Blog Feed on Forum Profile

A lot of you that regularly visit niche traffic sale are members of a bunch of internet marketing and other forums. And a lot of the time, people sign up to forums to take advantage of the signature link.

Again my regular readers know that this is not the best way to use forums to increase traffic. But I wanted to tell you an often overlooked and pretty effective method of getting links to your blog posts.

Before I go into it, getting links to your blog posts and signature links should not be your primary reason for joining forums. The primary reason for joining forums is to

• Build your reputation
• Learn from others in your niche
• Find out up to date information on your niche
• Exchange ideas

There are a lot of forums on virtually every niche online. And I am a member and regular participant in a bunch of forums

If you look in your profile page of whatever forums you are participating in, there often is a slot for you to insert your blog feed.

If you enter your blog feed here, a link to your latest post appears under your user name for every contribution you make on the forum

You must have seen them on the forums

On some forums these links have a do follow link to the particular post

So if you are a member of 20 forums and have your blog feed on those forums associated with your profile, that's a possible 20 instant backlinks, if you are active in those forums

You must remember to ping your posts.

Now I know some people are worried that if they post their blog feeds on the forum profile, competitors on the forums could steal their ideas.

But this is really not a big deal. The potential increase in traffic as a result of good SERPs position far out weighs any risk of your posts being copied.

Another bonus of this is some people actually click through on the latest blog link and visit your blog. If your content is useful, you may have a new follower.

So go to the forums you participate in and see if there is the facility to add your blog feed to your forum profile

Easy Directory Submissions For Backlinks

Was doing some analysis of the backlinks to one of my websites a few days ago and cam across a few interesting links
They were directory listings, do follow and some had PR as well.

Now if you are a regular reader of this blog you will know that using directories to build links is not something I focus on so much any more. There are more effective ways of getting do follow high PR backlinks

Anyway I scrambled around to find how I had submitted that particular site to the directories. I have only a few methods I use, so it was not too difficult to track down

Before I tell you what tool I used to submit these links, there is something you need to know.
Getting the maximum ROI of time invested is key on this niche affiliate marketing business. You really can not spend too much time on activities that may or may not yield results. For me, manual directory submissions is one of those activities.

By all means submit to DMOZ manually. But for other directories, a semi automated submitter is key, in my opinion.
Semi automated because it gives you the option of varying your anchor text and altering your description. That way you don't end up with a ton of backlinks all saying the same thing.

So back to my research.

I found that the links in question were links I had submitted with a web-based semi automated directory submitter called easy submits. I'll confess these were links I submitted while watching TV so not very effort intensive. And they were submitted months ago.

But hey, I have the do follow, some PR backlinks to show for the 'effort'

The site again is easysubmits.com

How To Validate Embedded You Tube Videos

For many of us, Youtube has been a gold mine for getting videos for our websites and blogs.

And Youtube has been very helpful by providing an embed code
All you have to do is grab the embed code of the relevant Youtube video and paste it in the relevant area of your sites or blogs html code and Hey presto, you have video on your site

Problem is it causes problems with your website's validation

What is website validation and why does this matter

Standardization

The code for websites, HTML or XHTML, must follow a certain standard which is set by W3 consortium. Your website code needs to be compliant with this standard.
You could argue that some browsers can correct for these errors but not all can. What you want is for your HTML code to be universally understood and interpretable

Search Engine Optimization

We all know that backlinks are a major component of search engine optimization. But on page factors play an important role. If the search engine spiders have difficulty interpreting part of your code, it could have major implications for how they handle the relevance of the related content

Page Loading Speed

Poor HTML coding could adversely affect the speed with which your website loads. And no-one hangs around waiting for a slow page to load. Also there are rumours that Google will soon update it's algorithm to include speed of loading as a factor. Now while this rumour is not verified, I think doing everything that you can to help your webpage or blog's performance in the search engines is not a bad idea.

So enough on validation and why you should validate your site. We will go into more details of this in another post

For now, back to the Youtube issue.

If you embed Youtube videos as is on your webpages, the code just does not validate

To check for the validity of your code use the W3 schools HTML validator
Just type in the URL of the page that contains a Youtube video and the result speaks volumes

But using Youtube videos is great. It has certainly helped increase the traffic to some of my websites

So how can you embed Youtube videos into your websites without corrupting your code

I use a free web based script and it works a treat
The script is at flash embed code validifier
Works for other embed sites as well

Till next time

Unique Method Of Getting Do Follow Backlinks To Your Niche Websites

So to continue with or backlinks theme I thought I would go over how to get do follow backlinks to your site

Now this method I cannot take credit for. But it certainly does work.

Before I go into the details of how you can find websites with do follow attribute on their outgoing links, lets take some time to review the more commonly used methods

Article Directories

Still a very good method of generating backlinks. Article marketing can be effort and time intensive but the links are under your control and the possibility for syndication is an added bonus.

By this I mean if other webmasters copy your article from the directory and post it on their web pages, they are obliged to include your link. Meaning more than one backlink from one article.

The added bonus, if your article gets syndicated, is you get IP diversity for the links i.e links from different websites on different servers per article. As long as your article is of such quality that people will want it on their sites.

I still think using ezinearticles to generate backlinks is a good strategy for generating backlinks I still recommend ezinearticles for this and you can read all about the nitty gritty of using this directory at ezinearticles and your niche website

Blog commenting

This one I am a little luke warm about. For a few reasons.

Your links are totally under the control of the blog's webmaster. He can decide to delete all comments or suddenly change from do follow to no follow attribute on his links or all other manner of behaviour that makes the links 'not so reliable'

Also there are not many high PR blogs out there that are willing to give out do follow links in their comments. Most of them have been sniffed out by spammers and have become no follow as a result of spamming.
So this means that a lot of the blogs you'll uncover will be of lower PR and although better than no links at all you'll need a ton of these links to make an impression on your own sites SERPs position.

Having said that, there are some really good tips on these posts how to find do follow backlinks and No and Do follow link finder

Forum participation

Some forums allow you to have a link in your signature and although the majority of the forums are no follow, there is still a healthy number of forums that have do follow attribute in their signature links. I am sure you have come across those forum posts that have a list of forums with do follow in their backlinks. And we all scurry to join and add our precious backlinks only to find one of the following

• You need 100 or 250 or some other number of posts before your signature can be displayed
  

• Or It's a paying forum...Ouch

• Or the forums are so overrun with spam that they either go to no follow or ban people at the drop of a hat.

There are still some forums out there that have been steady with the do follow attribute on outgoing links. Some useful affiliate marketing forums has more information on this

And we could go on and on

But I have recently been using a method that helps you

• Find sites with do follow outbound links

• Shows you how to find sites with IP diversity [very important]

• Teaches you how to create backlinks that actually do count

• Gives you a list of about 500 of these sites to get you going

You can learn more about this method at really serious backlinks

Does this method work. Well for the websites I have used it on, I have had an increase in my SERPs after just a couple of weeks.

Banish No Follow Links Find Do follow Backlinks

Specifically searching for sites that allow do follow links is something that I am little uneasy about talking about, certainly sharing tips about how to find do follow sites is something that I tend to do with a bit of concern.

Simply because of the share number of people who just spam these sites

But amongst us are ethical bloggers and webmasters and this post on finding do follow sites is for you

Please, please, please do not spam the sites you find using this technique

Make sure you add comments that are useful content and add to the conversation started in the blog or forum.

Before I tell you the method I am here to share today, a little explanation on why I search for the do follow attribute on links to my sites

Generally I tend to comment on blog posts that are relevant to me. I usually do not bother with if the blogs in question are do follow or no follow, call me stupid but I don't

The simple reason for this is most of the blogs and forums are low PR and there are better ways of getting high PR do follow links to your sites.

But I was curious to know which of my blog comments were generating the greatest amount of traffic to my sites. Hence my getting the software I will tell you about.

Funny enough the sites that generate the largest amount of direct traffic to my web pages are the no follow blogs. Go figure!
My explanation for this is people who visit these forums or blogs and bother to read the comments are mainly interested in the content rather than in dropping a spammy link.

Anyway so how can you generate do follow links to your website

This method requires you to use FireFox as your web browser. Click Firefox to download and install

FireFox as you all know is an open source web browser that is very versatile. The main advantage of FireFox is the plethora of plug ins available

One such plug in is the no do follow plug in.
Once you have installed FireFox, go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5687 and download the plug in. it takes a few seconds to install.

So what does the no do follow plug in do

When you launch any page that has backlinks on it in FireFox, right click your mouse to get a drop down menu. Select no do follow and all the links on the page are highlighted. Do follow links in blue and no follow in pink

So before you post your comment you can quickly and easily find out if the website supports do follow links in it's comments...At the click of the mouse literally

This method can help you find blogs that have do follow in outgoing links but again, please use this ethically

Social Networking Does Work

So I am certain that you have seen several posts extolling the virtues of social networking. And you are probably thinking
'Oh No! Not another post on how to use social networking sites'

Well I am not going to do that, i.e. point out all those obvious and rehashed tips that every other blog master has published

Instead I want to share with you a pleasant and profitable experience I recently had

First you should know that I have blogs that are mainly business blogs for example this one... and then I have blogs that are purely for my entertainment

The entertainment blogs are in areas that I find interesting. Hobbies so to speak

Anyway on one of my hobby blogs I wrote about a popular TV show. It's a show I like and hey I had something to say!

It's funny when you are writing without monetization in mind, the content can turn out pretty good

Anyway a few days later I noticed I had about 700 hits and rising. Thought it was a glitch in my traffic analysis. Usually the blog only gets about 50 uniques a day if that

More traffic analysis later and the answer is revealed. A big personality on Facebook had put a link to my post on their account!!

One link and a few days later has resulted in a few thousand uniques to the blog

Who says social networking doesn't work

The irony is, I hadn't done any of the networking. Go figure

About The New FTC regulations And Affiliate Marketers

As niche marketers or affiliate marketers, we have all heard about the new FTC regulations and have seen all the doom and gloom emails about how they can affect our business

For those of you who are totally unaware, the Federal trade commission has revised it's guidelines regarding endorsements and testimonials.

So how does this affect us as affiliate marketers

• Disclosure: As an affiliate marketer, there must be a disclosure included on every page stating your relationship to the product and that you get a commission for sales secured
• Accuracy: You are responsible for checking out the product and making sure that as far as your level of expertise, it does what it claims to do
• False Testimonials: that's self explanatory really
• Corroboration: In promoting a product it is the usual outcome of using the product that you can comment on not unusual outcomes [All those make $10000 overnight training courses suddenly spring to mind] You may be required to provide proof of such claims.

So those are the main things I have picked up so far

The question is does this really affect you as a niche marketer or affiliate marketer.

Well it really does depend on how you have conducted your business so far.

If you have followed the principles in this blog, you have no reason to worry. We have already covered promoting only products that you truly believe in.

We have also talked in some posts about how buying and using the product is the best way to get a feel of whether the product works and also allows you to promote the product with enthusiasm.

We have mentioned that having a disclaimer or disclosure on your site is crucial. Albeit it was with regards to AdSense but seems all forms of advertising apply

So perhaps there is not much cause for alarm for the ethical marketer

I'd advice though that you all take a look at the new guidelines and make sure that you've crossed all your T's and dotted all your I's