"The Secrets of List Building Unmasked"

This will be a fairly short post in answer to a question I recently received.

Many bloggers are repeatedly pinging their posts in the belief that it will help to get them indexed faster. If this is the practice you are following – STOP IT. you will only get away with this for a short while, and then the major search engines will begin to see it as spam and punish you accordingly.

If you want fast backlinks follow this little step-by-step procedure.

1. Install Firefox if you don’t already use it.
2. Install the plugin called SEO Quake. This is a Firefox add-on that will allow you to access all the relevant information for the blogs in your niche.
3. Find relevant blogs in your niche and choose the good PR blogs using SEO Quake’s statistics.
4. Post a comment on these blogs. Keep the comments relevant to the post content to ensure it will pass through moderation.
5. After you click the submit button, the address in the url bar at the top of your browser will change to something that resembles this:- http://www.ultimatebacklinkservice.com/blog/adsense-idea-update-two/comment-page-1/#comment-19 – Make a notepad file and copy this complete url.
6. Continue to find more blogs and posting more quality comments until you have a list of 20 or so.
7. Wait 24 hours and then open up that notepad file and select a url from the list. Copy and paste it into your browser and hit enter. If your comment appears on that page, it has been through the moderation process and has been accepted.
8. Now go to Pingler, Pingomatic, or one of the more popular ping services and ping that complete url. What you are actually doing is pinging the comment, the side effect of which is to get the post pinged again so only do it once or you will cause the site owner some spam issues. ( Why ping the comment? – WordPress blogs, as with almost every other blog, is set up to automatically ping new posts and pages – but not comments. So if you don’t ping it, nobody will ).
9. Now move on to the next url’s in the list and slowly work through them, following the same process. It is important to note that, if the comment has not been approved on your first visit, don’t panic. Give it another day to get passed the moderation process. If, after 48 hours, the comment still does not appear then you should delete it from your list and not waste time pinging it.
10. After going right through the list you should wait a week before pinging them again. During that week you should be constantly following the whole process over and over, creating new comments, checking for approval and adding them to your list. Follow this process for 4 weeks and then give it a rest.

This process will build you some good backlinks over the 4 weeks that you are actively working it, but it will also continue to build up a little more after you stop because not all links are found and listed immediately.

There are many good ways to build backlinks, this is only one method.

Now, here are some ways NOT to build backlinks.

Sites such as Fiverr.com list a hundred people that will provide you with hundreds, even thousands, of backlinks in a couple of hours and for only $5.00! What a fantastic deal – NOT! These people will use a site such as loganrockmarketing.com to ping your url to thousands of sites that they have no control over. This can be a red flag to the search engines and you could find yourself in the ‘Google sandbox’ for antics like this. The absolute only way to use a site such as loganrockmarketing.com is to have a ‘throwaway’ site, such as a Blogger.com site, that does nothing but redirect traffic to your money site. If this site gets sandboxed it is not the end of the world, and you may even score a few backlinks before that happens, but it is still a questionable procedure.

Fiverr.com does have some responsible members, such as Cathy_Rey, who will create 125 quality backlinks for you over a few hours using her own method that will not cause any backlash from the search engines ( in the spirit of a true professional she usually delivers more than the 125 that she promises ). There is also a chap who will build you a link-wheel for $5.00 – and that is good value – but I can not remember his name. So take my word for it, nothing beats slowly adding 50 quality backlinks every couple of days. I personally prefer to hand $5.00 to Cathy_Rey every week and have her build me about 140 quality backlinks that get indexed over time, but the choice is yours.

The moral to this story is – Pings Are Not Backlinks!

Create your backlinks and then ping them, you will succeed!

"The Secrets of List Building Unmasked"

Both Blocking and Accepting Blog Comments May Have Benefits.

Every so often, an argument and ensuing discussion erupts in the Blogosphere over whether or not it is ethical to block comments on a blog post and what value they actually add to content.

The latest one started when John Gruber at DaringFireball wrote a post in response to a John Battelle post about Apple blocking Google from iOS app Ads. Gruber has become somewhat famous around the tech Blogosphere for not allowing comments, and is usually referenced in these conversations.

Joe Wilcox at OddlyTogether wanted to respond to Gruber’s post, but obviously couldn’t do that via a blog comment, so he wrote his own blog post instead, questioning Gruber’s manhood. “If John Gruber allowed comments on his blog, I wouldn’t need to write this post, and it has been long-time coming,” wrote Wilcox. “I considered writing it every time I read something outrageous at Daring Fireball but couldn’t directly respond because John doesn’t allow comments. Finally, this morning, I had enough.”

“A man pushes out only as much as he can receive back,” he added later in the post. “By comparison, I see John attacking from a fortified position. He can attack but not easily be assaulted, and, yes, many of his posts are attacks on others. Sarcasm and witticism are the ammunition. Maybe John has different values of what is a man. My values are clear. A man-hell, a good writer-doesn’t hide behind his assertions. He stands by them. Discussion and response test his assertions and expose him to more points of view.”

Benefits to Eliminating Comments?

One thing seems clear to me. If you turn off comments, it forces the conversation outward. As Gruber has proven, people who want to respond to one of his posts have no choice but to blog about it themselves, tweet about it, or choose some other venue to discuss it. Most likely, those who wish to discuss it are going to link to DaringFireball to give their own content context. It seems entirely possible that by not allowing comments, Gruber is encouraging more links to his content. This may not be his intent, but it would appear to be the case nevertheless.

That’s not to say that this strategy will work for everyone. Don’t expect to turn off comments and automatically get more traffic. Obviously, you’re going to have to create great content that people want to discuss in the first place. The question you have to ask yourself is whether you want the conversation to happen where it started or to be broken up all over the web.

That said, the conversation (if enough people find it worth having) is going to be broken up all over the web anyway. Regardless of whether or not you allow comments on your blog, people are going to respond to it in what ever manner they prefer. These days for many people, that means simply retweeting it or liking it on Facebook (now people can even “like” the comments on Facebook too).

Maybe the real question is this: how much do blog comments matter anyway? There is no containing the conversation. It’s really been this way as long as blogs have been popular. People have always responded to others’ posts with their own blog posts. The fact that services like Facebook and Twitter have become so popular in the mainstream is what has changed. It’s so much easier to add your comment in a quick status update or tweet than it is to write a new blog post.

Likewise, many will find it easier to simply hit a “like” button or a “recommend button” for Facebook or a retweet button to express their approval of a blog post. With a tweet, they can add their own commentary too, and it really provides more benefit to them, because they are bringing the people they know into the conversation, as opposed to just participating in a conversation with a bunch of strangers that also read that blog.

Naturally, this also benefits the blog post by opening it up to increased exposure, and obviously more traffic, as well as potentially more links, which can even benefit you in search.

Comments Still Have Value.

Comments can add value to a blog post by presenting different perspectives around the subject at hand. Even Gruber has acknowledged this. But increasingly, more of those perspectives are being expressed externally. The entire conversation rarely (if ever) takes place on the blog post itself.

When readers see that a post has a lot of comments, they may be more inclined to read it. This is another valuable trait comments have, but if you display a count of retweets or Facebook Likes or Google Buzzes or Diggs, or whatever, it can achieve a similar effect. However, only the people that actually go to your site in the first place will see these counts. A more important factor to consider is probably that as more content is shared throughout networks like Twitter or Facebook, users will be more likely to read a post based on things like the title, who shared it with them, and what that person said about it.

Interestingly, Gruber was able to convince Wilcox to turn off his own blog comments. Would you ever consider taking that leap?

For more background and viewpoints on the conversation (of which there are many), I suggest reading through the various posts at DaringFireball and OddlyTogether.