Explore Studios

Sometimes niches don’t rely on search engine traffic, but rather links from other sites. This is a great way to start a site, and make money right off the bat. Although these methods involve mostly “nofollow” links, and thus are looked down upon by most SEO marketers, they are a good way to get a constant flow of traffic to your site, and if your ads are right, a small flow of money.

For excellent targeted traffic, I suggest Yahoo Answer. These work especially well with blogs, but other sites can be effectively advertised as well. The key is to first answer the question, so that people don’t just skip over a spammy looking ad. After the answer, put your link either in the source or the answer. These answers can take less than 20 seconds each to read, write, and complete, and as long as you include a good phrase like “If you need any more help check out my site: …” or “blahblahblah.com can probably help you with that problem” people will see the comments as legitimate and most of the time click to investigate. The best types of ads are those that don’t look like ads, and this marketing proves that point.

Another great way to advertise to gain traffic is in Facebook groups. Everyone has a Facebook these days and its really easy to just do a search for your niche, join a bunch of groups and post a comment on each group’s wall. Keep it short but not ad-like and people will click, because they are interested in the topic.

As was previously mentioned; these methods will not help you gain PR or count for anything search engine concerned. But they are an excellent way of getting people to your site, and keep them coming back if you have good content. Just remember you don’t get money for being the first on Google; you get money from people coming to your site, and this type of link building does just that.

Posting on Blogs and submitting to directories are just some of the ways to build great links to your site. To get links that people may actually click on because they want to go to your site, a link exchange with another site is a great asset. Whether it’s from a site that you own, or someone else’s in a similar or the same niche, link exchange won’t get you a huge number of links usually, but they are often very good ones. Often times, blogs may exchange links in return for a guest post.

When these few links are not enough putting a link in your signature on a forum is an excellent way to build hundreds of new links. May web masters are on forums anyway for fun, or to give and receive information, so posting hundreds or even thousands of times usually isn’t really a chore and is an excellent way to get a large buildup of links, “dofollow” or not.

One final link building tip that I will suggest is to make people want to link to people. A site with no content or reason for existence has a very limited shelf life: people will go to it with good SEO techniques and it might make $1 a day which is fine if you have 100 or so sites, but to make real money with a single site you must have content. With good content your site will be marketed for you and link building won’t be as necessary; people will link to your site from all over the internet. So remember: if you have good content and some saviness you can be successful without spending a dime on paid links. It just takes time.

When trying to make money online, one of the best things you can do is rank well in the search engines, and at least for now, the best way to do that is to build links. The more links, the higher you rank for keywords, and the more visitors and money you get. While it is certainly easier to simply pay for links, there are a lot of different tools you can use to build links on your own without paying a penny.

One way is to comment and leave links on “dofollow” Blogs. These are blogs with “dofollow” links meaning that search engines count them in the number of links, and thus a site’s ranking (as opposed to “nofollow” links which do not count). With some research you can find hundreds of these blogs that you can make a short non spammy comment and leave your link. This short task will increase your link number slowly but surely and you will see your site rise up in the rankings for your keyword.

Another way to build links is to submit to free directories. These are databases of sites, categorized in topics, with a large number of “dofollow” links. Though you’re likely not going to get a lot of traffic from these, as they aren’t exactly a very good way to find sites, what they do provide is another free way to build your link number. Just remember; the traffic will come later once the sites rise in the search engine rankings. So don’t lose hope!