Why Building Links Matter

Building links is such an important aspect when you build a website. You can go out there and get 10,000 pr1 or pr 0 sites but then you go ahead and just get one link from Microsoft or Entrepreneur and if that link is going to stay, the benefit is, it only takes you one of those links to get all of the same benefit you may have got from all of those other links.

To give an example of that, when I hosted the Entrepreneur Magazine E Biz show, it was hosted on a station called wsradio.com. They’ve got a lot of internet radio shows on it. But they also host eBay radio.

EBay has hundreds of millions of members, but the important thing is, eBay’s home page cycles ten times. So every time you hit the refresh page, it cycles ten times. It may have changed since. Because eBay radio was hosted on WS radio, I was second cousin if you will to eBay’s home page. My page rank was five or six out of ten.

I didn’t know why. I didn’t know how, it didn’t matter. It was five out of ten. Because eBay was linked to WS radio, WS radio was linked to customercatcher.com which was my brand. That enabled me to have a high pagerank. I rely on different ways than search engine ranking for people to find me. It’s direct relationships, direct referral, word of mouth marketing, buzz marketing, all those sort of things are definitely publicity.

The online articles are great because people can immediately click. The next is online press releases. The online press releases are great because if you use a service like prnewswire.com and you don’t use the free one, you use like the $80 to $100, they have different price ranges. But if you use a minimum of $80 you can make it onto the front page of Yahoo News, MSN.

I’ve done press releases for companies and we’ve had something like 127,672 views in a single 24 hour period to our website, for $80. This is in contrast to sitting down trying to figure out what’s going on behind the Google black curtain and sand box and getting slapped and doing the Google dance and everything else. You write a press release really well, a good headline, newsworthy, helpful information, and you drive 127,000 people to click on a link.

That’s the objective. One of the things that I really like, is systems. What you really need to focus on first before you build your system is, what is the objective? Is the objective of your website to increase your credibility? Is the objective of your website to get people to sign up for your newsletter? Is the objective of your website to get people to click and buy?

Whatever your objective is, you have to work your system. If you’re building a canal for ships, it is, I want the ships to go from Lake Ontario to Lake Eyrie. So I know the direction I’m going from, where I’m going to, do I want to blast through bedrock or do I want to dig through clay that I can easily take care of? I go a little bit longer route, but I get there just the same. The objective is gained, I save a ton of money, I don’t blow up two dozen people in the meantime.

Once you know what your objective is, then you can balance off what software you want to buy, what free stuff you want to use, how you’re going to do natural search engine ranking versus pay per click. If I did pay per click to get 100,000 clicks, even if I just got it down to a nickel, you do the math, that’s quite a bit of money versus $80 for a press release.

One of the other things you can do along the lines of publicity when you do those articles is send it to a syndicater. That syndicater takes that article and distributes it to other sites for you. So it’s something you can do once and then someone else is doing the work to distribute it for you.

So there are many ways to get publicity and drive traffic to your site. Choose the ones that work for you, and learn how search engines work and you will have a popular site.