There are tons of methods to get backlinks, like forum profiles, blog commenting, directory submission, link exchanges, blogging on 3rd-party websites (like blogger.com), etc.

If you've been here a while (if not, subscribe here), you also know that I don't employ just one method. I use them all! I call it Backlink Diversity (future product alert!)

Anyway, I just was notified of this neat little Firefox plugin called Social Monkee that gets you 25 backlinks a day, free, from different Class-C IP addresses (this is good because all of the backlinks come from very diverse websites).

Of course, Social Monkee works even if you don't use the Firefox browser. It's just a tad tedious if you don't. Fair warning.

Plus, of course, there is an option to upgrade for $47. I'll be honest with you–I'm trying the free version first. If I like it–and it brings results–I'll consider taking the plunge.

But for now, it's the free Social Monkee for me. You should check it out. You really have nothing to lose.

Today, you're in for a treat. I reveal exactly, step-by-step, how to create a backlinking bonanza that is easy to set up and even easier to maintain. And you will get literally dozens of backlinks from a single piece of content, automatically.

This is a long post. Get yourself a nice beverage and sit down in a comfy chair.

The Preliminaries

First of all, let's lay the groundwork. For maximum benefit, you will want to register. Go ahead and do that. Just click on the link; another browser window or tab will open. Just fill out the form, check your email, and click on the confirmation link. Then come back here.

What You Need

I'm a tool junkie. I use power tools so that I can get things done more effectively and efficiently. However, there is nothing wrong with doing things manually. In fact, doing things manually offers two benefits: One, you will really understand the process and Two, you will really appreciate the tools once you use them!

These are what I consider the Essentials:

• A Ping.fm account. Sign up here. Then come back.
• RoboForm. Of course, this one is optional, but once you use it, you will find that it cuts down your account set up time by half–or more. Plus, it's an awesome password manager.
• A good clipboard manager. I use Spartan Multi Clipboard

Laying the Foundation

You really should use Roboform for this, but I will just give you the method and a video will follow later to registered subscribers on how to set it up.

Essentially, once you're all set up on Ping.fm, you will be presented with the following page:

Pick the networks you want (I will share a list in a moment) by clicking the "Add Network" links. Do one at a time. Just follow the prompts.

If you're not using Roboform, I'll see you back here in 3 hours or so. It does take a long time to fill out all the forms and get them connected to Ping. (Using Roboform, I can set up an entire group of accounts in less than an hour. I typically charge customers $100 to set up a group of accounts for this very purpose, so it makes double-sense for me to streamline this process as much as possible.)

First, I don't set up Twitter, Facebook, or Facebook Pages to work with Ping. I simply haven't seen consistent results. I use Hootsuite for that; it works much better and the posts come out as expected.

Here's the list of social media sites I typically sign up for and use with Ping:

• Tumblr
• Identi.ca
• Brightkite
• FriendFeed
• Jaiku
• Blogger*
• Bebo
• WordPress.com
• YouAre
• Multiply
• Posterous*

* These are critical accounts to set up and use with Ping.

Now, go set up Hootsuite. (Video tutorial to follow to registered subscribers).

Find the RSS feed for your main blog and add that feed to Hootsuite. Set up Hootsuite so that every time you create a blog post, Hootsuite picks up the feed and sends it to the following:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Facebook Pages
• Ping.fm
  

Now, the magic happens. Each time you make a blog post, that post gets syndicated to your twitter page, facebook wall, facebook fanpage (if you have one), and Ping. All of those sites you connected to ping get your content, too!

Plus, a little extra icing on the cake: Set up the social media networks that Posterous works with, and you get another "downline" of links (when your blog gets picked up by Hootsuite, the content gets posted by ping to posterous to all of its associated websites, giving you backlinks to your backlinks)!

For even more icing, integrate RSS feeds into the mix, like so: All of those sites you set up have RSS feeds. Submit those feeds to RSS aggregators and you get dozens–if not hundreds–of backlinks, all from one blog post!

Whoa.

I'll show you how to do that in a subsequent post. The trick is in a WordPress plugin called Web Traffic Genius.

It uses Ping.fm, Hootsuite, and your RSS feed. It offers the following benefits:

• Once set up, it's completely automatic
• Gives your websites exposure to multiple social media outlets and blogging platforms, which gives you dozens of backlinks all at once, driving your websites up the search engine ranks
• Builds backlinks not only to your "money" website but also gives authority to your "tier 2" websites via "backlinking the backlinks" (think linkwheel without any complexity or models to follow)
• Can be easily "supercharged" using multiple RSS feeds to exponentially ratchet up your website search engine results

There is NOTHING "blackhat" about the method. You simply set up several (okay, A LOT) of social media profiles, manually, and then set up the process in a specific way. The key player in the process is Ping.fm.

Hootsuite makes it capable of supporting multiple feeds. More on that later.

I cannot emphasize enough how awesome this is going to be. I'll outline the entire project in a subsequent post and I most likely will sell the detailed project in a little ebook (for less than $10) if you want the nitty gritty details (which you will–trust me on this).

Look for a complete post in the next few days.

One of the best (easiest, most effective, and free) ways to get backlinks is through making comments on blogs. Now, these aren't just any comments, and if you do this right, not only will you get more backlinks, but you'll get some direct traffic, too!

In a perfect world (we'll call it "Bill's World"), you would browse websites and blogs and make comments whenever you felt you could add to the conversation. Ideally, when you did make a comment that the site owner approved, you would get a link back to your site so that people reading the original blog could visit your site if they liked — or were intrigued — by your comment.

It's sort of a "comment club," where people making intelligent comments are recognized for their contributions and people just looking for a backlink or — worse yet — making silly comments that are inflammatory, offensive, or just plain stupid, don't.

Commenting on blogs is really a win-win-win. The publisher/owner gets a conversation going, which serves to bring more people in the conversation as well as getting return visits to see how/where the discussion has gone; the commenter gets people to visit his site and know more about him (plus, he gets the link), and the readers get to soak it all in and maybe even enjoy the experience.

A few years ago, Google muddied the comment waters by making up this attribute called "nofollow," which caused a tissy in the blogging community as well as the SEO community. It was Google's intention, I think, of making the commenting system less SPAMMY (there was — and still is — a lot of that). The idea was that Google's search bots and algorithm would not follow the comment link and would give it little to no weight in its ranking.

(This is highly convoluted stuff. Bottom line is Google caused a lot of confusion with this and WordPress and other blogging systems took Google's lead and made the "nofollow" attribute the default.)

Lots of folks will tell you that it's not worthwhile to comment on "nofollow" blogs, as they're called. I disagree: Your comments will still "count" as a backlink.

You may ask, "Huh?" And my answer would be, "Uh huh."

The evidence shows that some of this "link juice" still passes, even on a "nofollow" blog. Not that it really matters.

You still get the link. You still get the direct traffic that comes as a result of somebody clicking on your name in the comments. All is well and good.

There also is the notion that you ought to pick roughly equal numbers of  "no follow" and "do follow" blogs to comment on, as this practice looks far more natural to the search engines than just going for backlinks from "do follow" blogs.

How Comments Work

The standard commenting system, employed by default by WordPress, is one where you, as the commenter, type in your name, email address, website URL, and text for your comment, like so:

When your comment is approved and published, your name will be the anchor text to your site, as such:

See the blue text up there? The anchor text, billspaced, contains a link back to my site.

Now, you can get a little fancy and rather than typing in just a name, you could type "Joe the Plumber" which will set your backlink to use your keyword (if you're a plumber, of course) or you could go a bit farther with "Joe the Columbus, Ohio Plumber."

These tactics, if used judiciously, can result in a better backlink than your standard name. However, this tactic could also backfire because the website owner could decline your comment submission or — worse yet — mark it as SPAM if he uses one of the anti-SPAM comment plugins in WordPress (Akismet is the one I use and I highly recommend it if you have a WP blog).

There are some other neat plugins that blog owners may use. CommentLuv is one that is fantastic and one day I may actually install it here. I really like it and it's one of the blog attributes I seek when I want to get some backlinks from blog comments. There's also an extension of that one called KeywordLuv that lets you — even encourages you — include keywords in the name field (as in the examples of Joe the Plumber above).

There is one other WP plugin that site owners employ, and that is one of the many variants of "top comments."

Ways to Find Great Blogs On Which To Comment

{{{4.95}}}I don't necessarily use these methods often, but they are definitely effective. I generally just browse around for whatever topic I'm currently writing about — or have just written about — and contribute to the conversation and I use the URL of the article I just wrote (CommentLuv makes this easy because, by default, it picks your last post as your URL for your backlink).

I am going to show you several ways to find good blogs to comment on. Basically, we will be looking for "footprints" that these commenting systems/plugin leave and once you know them, you can simply use Google (in the examples below) or another search engine to find them.

(Remember — I cannot say this enough — make value-added comments. Add to the conversation. Say something intelligent. Please.)

Method 1 — CommentLuv

In Google's search box, enter the following text string where keyword = "dog training" exactly:

If you want to find all the CommentLuv enabled sites, just leave out the keyword. If you want to look for these types of blogs with "internet marketing tools" as the keyword, it would look like so:

Method 2 — KeywordLuv

In Google's search box, enter the following text string where keyword = "dog training" exactly:

Method 3 — Top Comments

In Google's search box, enter the following text string where keyword = "dog training" exactly:

As always, there are numerous variants on these methods — feel free to modify them as you like; share them here in the comments if you find something especially worthwhile / effective.

Method 4 — Comment Kahuna

One final method I use to find good blogs on which to comment is actually a tool. It's called Comment Kahuna (just click the link and you can download it), which is free.

One Final Thing

When I do make a comment that I find is later approved and is "do follow" I bookmark the site. These are sites that I go back to when I set up another of my own sites for which I need to build backlinks quickly.

Once you know the "footprint" of the various commenting systems, you will be able to easily make comments to get valuable backlinks.

Please, however, make relevant backlinks that add to the conversation. Do it for the blog owner, but do it for yourself, too (no need to get tagged as a SPAMMER).

Tying It All Together

When I start a new site, I always employ this system: 5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks

It's my "proprietary" system (big deal, nothing earth-shattering here) that I use to get my site's content indexed quickly, get it ranked highly as quickly as possible, and get traffic flowing to it in a matter of days rather than months.

Next up: Article Submission

Up next: How to avoid abusing this awesome utility, pinging!

But I will tell you that they appear to do similar things…and RankBuilder is $4.95 for the first week and then $67 a month thereafter, compared to SEnuke at $127 a month.

I will say that SEnuke is 100 percent worth the money, so if RankBuilder even comes close to SEnuke, it's a winner based on value.

Getting backlinks is one of the surest ways to get high rankings in the search engines. That is a fact. Linkwheels, RSS feeds, forum profiles, articles, etc. – one of the main benefits of any of these methods is getting a valuable backlink from a high PR site.

You could spend all week doing this "off-page" SEO work. Or you could hire out a staff to do it for you. Both will cost you more than $127 a month.

Or you could try RankBuilder for automated backlinking.

$4.95 for a week. You probably spend more per day on coffee from Starbucks!

PS - When my week trial is up for RankBuilder, I will do a comparison between RankBuilder and SEnuke. I'll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly, for both. Cool?

A blog without readers is pretty much useless. If you’ve been blogging for a while and have only been getting a trickle of viewers to your posts, you need to put a traffic building plan into action. Building traffic is just as an important skill to bloggers as writing quality posts is. Many bloggers are terrific at creating content but don’t know a thing about building traffic. Here is a quick guide to the five most popular (and most effective) traffic building techniques.

1. Get SOCIAL!

Social networking and blogging go hand in hand. Your blog posts can be distributed across social networking channels in many different ways. Sign up for Twitter and tweet about your posts as soon as they are added to your blog. Update your Facebook status with a link to your new blog posts. Submit your stories to Digg.com, Reddit.com and StumbleUpon.com. Remember that in order for social networking to be effective, you need to participate with other people on your list. If you visit their links and respond to their updates, they’ll be likely to do the same for you.

Check out the bottom of this post. See the little icons underneath "Share and Enjoy?" That's the "Sociable" plugin for WordPress. I also employ Hootsuite to automatically update my Twitter status and my Facebook fan page. I'll put together a tutorial on how to use Hootsuite for this purpose if you express an interest.

2.Get SEEN!

Find blogs in your niche and start following their posts. Make sure to add insightful and interesting comments on their posts. Not only will the blog owner take notice and visit your blog, other commenters will visit your blog to get more of your great insight into the topic. Don’t spread yourself too thin with blog commenting, but make it a point to comment on a few related blogs each week.

Not only will you get direct traffic, but you'll also get valuable, relevant backlinks from commenting! Win-win, baby!

3.Get SYNDICATED!

RSS feeds are a way to syndicate your blog’s content so that it is sent to many different people in their own blog readers or on their own sites. Most blogging systems have RSS feeds automatically included but you can add a lot more functionality to your feed by using a free service like FeedBurner.com. With FeedBurner you can add things like sharing the feed via e-mail so it will pull in new readers and encourage previous visitors to come back to the blog again.

See the little icon in the upper righthand corner of the page? That is the RSS feed link for Internet Marketing Muscle. You should click on it

4.Get PUBLISHED!

You may think that by being a blogger you can ignore article marketing. However, you can get a lot  of traffic to your blog by tweaking some of your popular blog posts and adding them to article directories. You can post your popular posts as articles with a link back to your blog in many different article directories. Not only will you get a valuable backlink but your article may also be used by ezine owners which will bring you more traffic.

Plus, your article will get direct traffic from visitors at the article directories. Another win-win. Except this time it's win cubed – you get a backlink, direct traffic, possible syndication, AND you will become known as an expert in your field. But don't call yourself a guru! Let others do that

Oh, yeah, you also get to leverage content you've already written! That's 5 benefits to article marketing! Very powerful stuff.

5.Get BACKLINKS!

Speaking of backlinks, you should work to build backlinks to your blog through several different means. By creating backlinks to your blog, you’ll improve your blog’s ranking in search engine results. You can get lots of traffic from search engines if you are within the first group of search results for your keywords.

Check out 5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks for a simple backlink-building system.

These five ways of building traffic can be used over and over again to help build traffic to your blog and increase your readership.
 

• Build ranking in the Search Engines
• Drive direct traffic, too (don't discount this one)

Put don't put all your backlinking eggs in one basket. Many IM guys try one tactic and that tactic may work – for now. But what if the Big G catches on?

For example, linkwheels are pretty popular. The idea is to get backlinks to a "money page" by writing articles and submitting them to popular article directories as well as Web 2.0 properties like Blogger.com.

One popular linkwheel method goes something like this:

• Write article. Put in two links – one to your "money page" (the page you ultimately want visitors to see and act on) and one to a Web 2.0 property.
• Write a second article or post with 2 links again, this time one to your money page, the other to the first article (prior bullet).
• Repeat, always linking to your money page with one link and with the other link pointing to the last article you posted.

This is all fine and good. What you're doing is building the rank and PR of the articles and posts to Web 2.0 properties (by backlinking to them) as well as getting a ton of backlinks to your money page.

However, linkwheels are pretty easy to spot. Especially if you do your linking with the same properties and in the same sequence every single time (so, don't do this).

What if Google decided that it would discount – or worse yet, disregard - any backlinks from linkwheels? Not that they would or have plans to, but what if they did and this was your only (or primary) backlinking methods?

You would be screwed, plain and simple.

So what I do and wholeheartedly recommend is to diversify your link building methods.

5 x 5 A System for Building Backlinks

I have a very simple system that I follow every day until I'm comfortable with my website's position in the SERPs. I call it a "5×5" system, very similar to a very popular strength-training system in the bodybuilding field.

Here's what I do (every day), put very simply:

1. I make 5 comments on other blogs. I don't necessarily care about PR or whether they are "do follow." I just make 5 value-added comments. One tool I use for this purpose is Comment Kahuna.
2. I make 5 forum posts in relevant forums. The purpose here is two-fold: One, I get the backlink, and Two, I build credibility in my industry.
3. I use "Angela's Backlinks," a very popular service that gives you roughly 30 high PR sites you can visit to get a backlink each month. (I know, 30 sites is only good for 6 days of backlinking here, but I have been a customer for quite some time and each month I can go through old packets to fill in 5 a day for a month). I highly recommend this service! Especially for a brand-new site. There really is nothing better than getting 30 very high PR backlinks when you first fire up a website.
4. I submit my site to 5 directories a day. There are a host of sites that have nifty indexes of literally thousands of web directories. Just find the appropriate category and then find the "submit URL" button. I used to use Directory Submitter by Brad Callen, but it seems to have been taken down and I lost my original copy. But everything you need is on the web – you just have to find it.
5. I make 5 submissions to social media sites like digg, StumbleUpon, Facebook, Twitter, and the like. A good "meta" social bookmarking site is Social Marker.

This is the bare minimum that I do with a new website. I also write a TON of articles, set up dozens of Web 2.0 properties, etc. I'll write more on this later. This will give you a really good start on building backlinks to a brand-new blog.

If you do the math, you'll have 750 backlinks by the end of your first month. Not bad. In fact, good enough to rank very high in the SERPs for well-chosen long-tail keywords.

I do have a few tricks up my sleeve for automating some of this, but I'll leave that for another post. If you want to learn more about any of this, just leave a comment.