Entrepreneurship

Backlink growth method: Reviewing other bloggers

By Johnny Fuery ⋅ March 21, 2007 ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

John Chow recently ran a very public experiment in an effort to change his search engine ranking for the specific search term, Making Money Online (there, have another one, John). His experiment not only proves that anchor text is incredibly important, but illustrates a great way to build backlinks while helping out the blogosphere community.

We all blog because, in some form or another, we want to be heard. Whether our audience is our great aunt Gertrude or 15K unique strangers a day, we want that audience. Sometimes, even, your audience might simply be your future self. I have an anonymous, uber-personal blog I’ve shared with only a select few for just this very purpose. But back to my point — backlinks.

Offering to swap links with fellow bloggers (and/or your audience) is a great way to build traffic. I personally took John Chow up his offer to link back to anyone who reviewed his blog just last week, and that has created some inquiries from other folks who are copying the idea. Here are some folks who would be delighted to trade links with their fellow bloggers:

• (Shameless Plug) A really smart guy I know: Review me and I’ll be delighted to reciprocate. Plus, if you sign up for a new PayPerPost account, you can submit the same review to them and make a cool $7.50. Give me a link with the anchor text “really smart guy”. Or, if that doesn’t suit you, I’ll settle for “crazy landlord” or “affiliate marketing genius”. :-)”
• Ja Kel Daily Dot Com eventually wants to make money blogging and is offering to link to your blog if you review their (it’s a his/her authorship, although writing appears to be more of a masculine exercise in this case) blog. Relative to the Shoemoneys and John Chows of the world, I don’t have as much to learn from Jason and Kelly based on what posted so far, but they earned an add into my newsreader nonetheless. They also pay a lot more attention than I do to their presentation, which just goes to show you that every blog has something cool to offer, even if it’s not a niche your particularly interested in.
• Blogged Out is a blog about blogging, offering quality Blog Promotion Tips and Advice without quite so much of the overarching focus on making money that most such blogs evoke. I like that about the author’s work. He, too, gets a place in my RSS reader. I’ll be taking cues from you regularly, Darren, starting with a contact page. Been meaning to do that for, oh… about a year now. I guess I needed the reminder. His shout out to potential contributors is here.
• My Retirement Blog is written by a web designer in Alberta (Canada) named Corey Stroeder. His blog is a little more like mine in that it’s a little more scatterbrained than lots of other blogs out there. His site is nevertheless much better designed than your average blog presence. His skills show. Like the others on this list, he’ll provide a linkback for a review, too. I like the fact that Corey is so open with his thoughts and intentions. His personality shines through in his writing in a way that most of the big professional bloggers seem to have lost over time. It is, perhaps, one of the nastier side effects of speaking to a mass audience. I hope my own personality shines through as well as Corey’s does.
• ZeroTomed.com is offering a linkback AND a monthly cash prize for the top three reviews. (Update: Jacob never posted a linkback nor a review, so I’m killing his link. We even chatted on the phone once after trading several emails, but he still didn’t show me any love.) I’m not sure if Jacob’s rating system is based on how well written the review is, whether or not the submitter likes his work, or if it’s completely random. The site itself is written by a medical student who writes well enough, but he’s a little over-the-top when it comes to the making money angle. Every single blog posting has a “sponsored link” in it, which I’m not sure what to make of. It looks to me like most of these are going to other sites of his, which is fair enough. I freely acknowledge that I occasionally take a PayPerPost gig and shamelessly promote myself all the time. After all, it’s my blog, why not? Still, despite some pretty honest admissions (his weblog is important to him, but only after his studies and his girlfriend — fair priorities, mate) AND useful information (he’s got a myspace promotion experiment currently in progress that I’ll be checking back on), the general sense I get is that it’s all a little manufactured. Jason, I would suggest you move the sponsored links to the bottom of your posts. Readership first, right? Also, while I’m criticizing (hopefully constructively), the san serif font (sans serif means, loosely, “without the flags” — Helvetica and Arial are common variants) is hard to read. This is especially true of AvantGarde, the font my Firefox/Win32 browser is using to render the site. Body text should almost always be a serif (with the flags, i.e., roman-style fonts like Times or Garamond). This is true of both printed and web materials, despite the fact that I’m not taking my own advice at fuery.com. You might also want to play with the kerning and leading (space between letters and lines) a bit. Other than that, I really like the interface — the clean, elegant look rocks, and is actually analagous to your writing style, which can only help the entire experience. I do have to admit that I’m a little confused as to how you’re able to give away $50 a month in prize money, yet recently, you complained about $50 a month for web hosting services. Perhaps because one is revenue-generating (or supports it) and one is a fixed cost? Not a big deal, but I did find it curious.
• Andréa Coutu writes a blog about how to become a consultant. She’s earned herself a pagerank of 4 despite being in the blogosphere for less than a year (thanks Alexa for that one, Andréa) and has a very readable blog. It looks to me like she has experience doing technical writing or editing, because despite being the sole author of the blog, she writes in the third person and goes to great lengths to keep the verbiage straightforward. While one side effect is that the content seems predominantly geared for folks just starting out in the consulting game, writing in this language all the time is actually very difficult. That’s one of the reasons I like blogging over other writing mediums, in fact — sometimes I can just rant and, well, it’s ok. (Or have far too many parenthetical statements!) Not so for Ms. Coutu. Of the content itself, the elementary nature of it makes me shy away a little, but there’s plenty of tips that old pros would do well to pay attention to. (I make a solid second income from my own moonlighting, for instance, and you won’t even find a link to my resume on handily available here. Nor do I have a card! Andréa would slap both my wrists twice. :-)) For anyone starting out, I certainly recommend her. Oh, and finally, she’ll give you a linkback in exchange for a review like this.

In looking for other bloggers like me who are up for this mutual review deal, I’m actually overwhelmed by how much good content is out there. There’s quite a few enterprising folks who enjoy writing. No wonder it’s so difficult to get noticed on merit alone!