ok. Turning this over to Susanne. Enjoy her brilliance!

SEO Tips: How to Optimize your Article Marketing with Keywords

Article marketing is a great way to get traffic and back links to your website, but when you combine this strategy with keyword optimization, you can really drive targeted visitors to your site. Today, I'd like to share the exact steps I use every time I sit down to do some article marketing (or at least most of the time ).

Step One – Optimizing Content On Your Own Site

I always start with the content on my own site and recommend you do the same. I'm just talking plain old on-page seo stuff here. Make sure you pick a good keyword for your new content (for your blog post) and use the keyword in the title as well as 2 or 3 times in the content of your page.

For example, when I sat down to write this blog post, I chose the keyword “keyword optimization” for this post. I used it in the post title and am also sprinkling it throughout the content.

In step 4, you will also use the same keyword again as the “anchor text” for the link back to your site in the resource box of the article that you will write and submit to article directories. More on that in a little bit.

Step Two – Coming Up With An Article Topic (For Article Marketing)

Once I know which page (or blog post) on my site I want to promote with the article, I like to come up with a related topic (or two) for the articles that I will be submitting. Think of something that will allow you to easily transition into the resource box with the link back to your site.

For example, if I wanted to submit an article to promote this blog post here about keyword optimization for article marketing, I may consider topics like:

• How to write a good article title
• A strategy for writing an article in under 15 minutes
• Getting traffic with article marketing

With any of these topics it would be easy to transition into a resource box that invites the reader to this blog post to learn more about how they can make sure their articles get the most traffic by using keyword optimization.

Step Three – Finding A Good Keyword

Once I come up with the general topic for the article, I go back and do some more keyword research. This new keyword will be used to optimize the article that I'm writing and submitting to article directories.  I want to find a keyword that's not terribly competitive but gets at least 20 or 30 searches per day. I use wordtracker to find those keywords, but you can also use several free tools available.

You can read more about how to do the keyword research and why you should not skip this step in this blog post:
What Is Keyword Research

Read through it and then do your keyword research using your tool of choice.

I did some research on the topics from above and decided on the third topic. My keyword for the article will be “article marketing promotion”

Step Four – Writing The Article (For Article Marketing)

Once you have your keyword, it's time to write the actual article. Make sure you use the keyword in the title of your article. I like to use it first thing in the title. So my article title in this example may be “Article Marketing Promotion – Drive Traffic To Your Website By Writing Quality Articles”.

Then write your article, making sure you use the keyword again 2 or 3 times throughout the content. I like to write articles that are about 400 to 500 words long and break them up into several small paragraphs to make them easy to read.

Don't forget to transition into a resource box that links back to the page of your choice on your website using the keyword for that page as the anchor text of your link.

My  article on using article marketing to drive traffic for example, may end with a resource box like this:

And now I would like to invite you to learn how you can get even more targeted traffic by using keyword optimization in your article marketing.

Step Five – My “Super Secret” Weapon For Ultimate Results

Ok, this technique isn't exactly super secret and chances are that you have heard about it, but almost no-one actually does it, yet when you do, the results of your article marketing will skyrocket. That means your site will get a lot more traffic and that means a larger list and more customers for you.

The secret is to not just stop at writing and submitting the article that promotes a page of your website. Instead promote your promotion, by doing some link building to the article itself once it is published. Start with some simple things like bookmarking the article using social bookmarking tools and sending it out to your twitter stream. If it's worth the effort (and you have the time), you may also want to write another related article and link in the resource box to the first article. Often that's enough to get the article listing on the first page of Google's search results for your keywords. And that of course will result in quite a steady stream of traffic to your site from your article marketing efforts.

Susanne Myers

Check out Susanne's complete Link Building Course Here:
Links Building for Beginners

Hey all. If you have questions, comments, or need examples, let us know. We'll be here to help.

Warmly,
Nicole Dean

There's a picture of us together from earlier this year. ->

I'm the closer one and she's the one further away. We're both thinking hard, getting smarter.

Well, I'll step down and let Susanne take the stage and shine.  Here she is…

A Step-By-Step Approach To Creating A Niche Website

by Susanne Myers

I spent the past weekend with Nicole at NAMS (Niche Affiliate Marketing Workshop) in Atlanta where I spent a good bit of my time helping out in the beginner room.

The first stumbling block for many beginning Internet Marketers seems to be choosing a niche that they will then build a website or blog in.

Over the years I've done quite a bit of niche research. Here's my process I go through every time I am considering going into a new niche.

First of All, What IS A Niche?

Let's start by talking about what exactly a niche is.

According to Wikipedia, a niche is

“the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing; therefore the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs, as well as the price range, production quality and the demographics that is intended to impact”.

For Internet marketing in particular they have the following to say:

By appealing to smaller segments of larger markets, referred to as niches, a website can be developed and promoted quickly to uniquely serve a targeted and usually loyal customer base, giving the affiliate a small but regular income stream.

Let's look at an example. Health and Wellness is a large market, weightloss is a subset of that market. We can then “niche” it even further down by choosing “weightloss for new moms” as our niche.

Is It a Profitable Niche?

Next I like to take a look at the profit potential of a niche. Some things to consider are:

• Is it popular?
• Does it solve a problem or entertain?
• Is there a magazine (or even better several magazines) out there that target your niche market?
• For ecommerce sites, if you can't find the product at large stores like Wall-Mart, you have a pretty good chance of being able to sell it online.
• Do others buy google adwords ads for products in this niche?

If you can answer several of these questions with a definite yes, your niche has quite a bit of profit potential and it is usually worth spending a little time putting together a website to test the niche further.

Who's My Target Market for this Niche?

My next step is to put myself into my customer's shoes. Get as much information about your target market as you can. Who are they? What kinds of problems do they have that you can help with. What questions do they have that you can answer. Great places to research your target market are niche forums and sites like yahoo answers.

Are There Products I Can Sell?

Before you start building your new site, I want you to check on one more thing…  Are there any products (eletronic or physical) that you can sell to this market? I like to start by looking at affiliate products. Later on I might consider developing my own products, but for now let's focus on affiliate products. If you have several options, move on to the next step.

If there are no good products out there, it may be time to move to another niche. Please do not skip this step. I have spent hours and hours developing a site in the past only to notice a week or two into the project that there was really no good way to monetize the site.

Time For Keyword Research

I mostly get free traffic via search engines to my niche sites and the way to do this is to do some keyword research and then optimize content for these terms.

Pick your favorite keyword research tool. I personally use the paid version of wordtracker, but even the free wordtracker keyword tool or the google adwords keyword tool will do.

Spend a little time figuring out what terms are searched for in your market. Put them in a spreadsheet so you can refer to them easily when you start to create your content plan.

I like to sort my keywords into 3 different segments. The first is my main term. This will be the keyword with the highest search volume, but it will also be very hard to rank for. That keyword becomes my main focus for the home page of my website.  Next I like to choose 5 to 10 keywords that are very general, but a little easier to rank for than the main one. Those become my category pages. All other keywords will be used in individual articles blog posts. This sorting is the first step toward creating a content plan. Let's talk about that a little more.

But first, if you want to learn a bit more about keyword research, listen to this panel discussion I was involved in along with SEO experts Karon Thackston, Lynn Terry and Dan Morris. It's $17, but I think you'll find it well worth the small investment.

Creating A Content Plan

I like to take those “sorted” keywords and come up with a content plan for my new website or blog. It helps me get things up quickly when I'm ready. A great way to organize the keywords is to use a mindmap. You can see a very simple example in the image below:

Of course you would add quite a few more long-tail keywords for the individual article pages (shown here in green). As your site grows you can expand by adding more and more keyword targeted articles.

Of course you can also do the same on paper if you are not comfortable with mindmapping.

Building Your Site

With your plan in hand, it's time to build your niche site. You will need a domain name, website hosting and some sort of content management program. While there are quite a few good ones out there and you could even build a static html page, I prefer using the free wordpress blogging software (www.wordpress.org) to build my niche sites. (If you've never installed a blog, ReliableWebs.com will set one up for you.)

Use your mindmap or content plan to lay out your categories, then start writing your content using the long-tail keywords. I like to get about 10 or so posts in to begin with and then work on adding a few more each week.

Content Promotion Strategies

The last step is to go out and actively promote your new site and the individual articles on it. It's a little outside of the scope of this blog post to cover content promotion in detail, but here are a few ideas to get your started:

• Tweet about your new site and new articles as you add them.
• Do some article marketing.
• Participate on popular niche forums and include a link to your site in your forum signature.
• Comment on other popular blogs in the niche.
• Write some guest blog posts on other blogs.
• Build some backlinks to each page of your site to get it ranking well in the search engines.

I hope you found this step-by-step approach to niche research helpful. Yes, there is quite a bit of work involved, but it's also a fun process to go through once you get a hang of it.

Of if you prefer, I'll do all of the research for you. I create niche research packs that include all sorts of other important niche info at your finger tips to help you enter a new niche or dominate one that you're already in.

Check them out at NicheResearchPacks.com

Susanne Myers

I hope this was helpful!

Please let us know if you have questions by commenting below. We’re happy to keep answering questions as long as you keep asking.

Have a great day!

Warmly,
Nicole Dean

No, I won't be showing the undies from Expert Marketers (although that would certainly be funny) – but I will be grabbing my friends who I respect and admire and will be asking them to give brief replies to your burning questions about internet marketing and online business success. (Get it? Briefs? Yes, I am easily amused.)

I've been wanting to do this series for some time, and, thankfully, I have a great Virtual Assistant who is helping me to put this together or it may never have gotten done.

So, let's jump in. Today's topic is Link Building, specifically how to get one-way incoming links to your website or blog.

If you recall, I've posted a few blog posts about Link Building recently that you can go back and review if you're wondering what all the fuss is about Link Building and why on earth it's important.

• What is Link Building? Into for Beginners.
• What to do Before You Begin Link Building.
• Link Building FAQ: Questions and Answers

The question I asked our experts today is:

“What is your favorite method for building incoming links
to your website or blog? Why?”

I only asked people who I know are actively link-building. Of course, I have plenty of other friends who use other methods of generating traffic, but this blog post is about one-way link building so these are the experts I chose to ask along with their replies.

Willie Crawford of SellMoreBigTicket.com says:

My favorite method is writing and distributing articles.  I've written over 1500.

The reason is that not only do I get lots of inbound links from some fairly high page-ranked sites, but the articles also actually bring me in visitors who have read my material and arrive at my site pre-sold on me.

Lynn Terry of ClickNewz.com says:

My favorite method of link-building is to get featured on blogs that reach my market. There are a couple of ways you can do that. You can write guests posts for those blogs, or offer to let the blogger interview you. Text interviews are best for creating relevant content to go along with your backlink, but audio interviews with a description and live link work well too.

With blog interviews, I email the blog owner and introduce myself (with credentials, basically selling myself as a good match for their audience). I give them the option to reply with 3-5 questions (or more if they like) on a topic related to their current theme. I then reply with the answers, creating a very nice blog post for them to publish.

If you have an affiliate program, you can offer to let them sign up as an affiliate so that they can earn commissions on the interview as well.

This is one of my favorite methods for 2 reasons:

1) Bloggers need content. It's the one thing they are constantly searching for, or working on. You can step in and help them out, and help yourself out at the same time.

2) This is one of the BEST types of inbound links you can possibly get. You have control over the topic, so you get a relevant backlink from a related page. And you control the link, meaning you can deep link to an internal page on your site or blog – and use specific Anchor Text with that link.

Plus… it's easy!

The trick is to make it highly relevant to their current theme of content, or to expand on a topic they recently blogged about. You just want to find a good tie-in that makes sense both for the blogger and for their readers.

Mark Mason of MasonWorld.com says:

Nicole — getting links is all about a tradeoff between effort, quality and quality.  Often, especially when people are just starting out, they will make the mistake of spending lots of time (or money) on low quality links.

For me, time is my most precious resource.  So, when I go after a link my efforts need to be highly leveraged.  That means that for my investment of time, I need to get lots of links or really great (powerful links).  The answer almost always lies in quality content.

For example, I can write one piece of quality content and syndicate it to multiple high quality article directories using automated tools.  This get's me multiple quality backlinks in addition to whatever click-through traffic the article generates.

Or, I can write a great article for a guest response post on a high traffic blog like NicoleOnTheNet.com in exchange for a backlink from the article.  That get's me a quality backlink and clickthrough traffic as well.

Either way, the key is great content out on the internet pointing back to my site.

Susanne Myers of EasyLinkLove.com says:

My favorite way to build links is to create what I like to call a link magnet. It’s a piece of REALLY GOOD content that you post freely on your website. This could be a report, an article, a list, even an audio file or a video. You want to give away some of your favorite stuff here.

Start by thinking about what your target audience really wants. You can also do some research by asking your current readers and visitors or using sites like Yahoo answer or forums in your market to get a feel for what your audience wants.

Spend some time creating exceptional content and post it to your site. Do some keyword research and optimize the page for those keywords so you can build some free search engine. Start promoting the content by blogging about it, mentioning it on twitter and other social media outlets. Tell our lists about it and always invite people to share the link to the content.

Monetize your link magnet by adding a link somewhere toward the end of the content for one of your products. It’s important not to be pushy here or people will be less likely to link to it.

Here are a few examples of good link magnets:

$40 Emergency Menu
This is on one of my own sites. The basic idea is a low cost emergency menu that people can turn to when grocery money is extremely low.

Online Success Podcasts by Nicole Dean
Nicole has recorded several hour long interviews with various experts in the Internet Marketing Field. She focuses on delivering high quality content and does an amazing job coaxing all kinds of useful information from her guests.

Quick Extra Tip –

I always like to get the most mileage out of everything I do, especially link building. Don’t do this just for the sake of building links, take it a step further and reap even more rewards. An easy way to do this is to keep tabs on who is linking to this new page. Contact the owners of some of the best sites and see if you can collaborate even further.

And, here's my 2 cents. I wrote this before reading the others just to make sure I wouldn't let their ideas sway mine.

Nicole Dean of .. well, here! .. says:

My favorite method of building incoming links is simply sharing content. I know, it's kind of a cheater answer, but let me finish here and you'll see what I mean.

All of the most effective methods, in my opinion, revolve around sharing your own expertise. Let me demonstrate…

-> Article Marketing is simply sharing content.

-> Guest Blogging (or even hosting a kick-butt Blog Tour) is sharing content.

-> Video marketing (recording and posting videos to sites like YouTube) – again, is nothing more than sharing content.

-> Podcasts (being a guest on other people's podcasts) – is simply sharing your expertise, again.

-> Doing quick interviews like this one – you'll notice all of my experts are receiving links to their sites. Badda bing, badda boom! I'll bet those are some of the easiest links they've gotten.

-> And, blog commenting works, too. Blog commenting means just leaving comments on blog posts like this one. (Hint, hint.) Although I honestly believe that it's not the most effective method of generating incoming links, at least not compared to the methods outlined above, it's still worth doing.

Of course, you can tie in social media and link to all of these sites where you've got your content to really boost your effectiveness. But, it all starts by doing what you're already doing as a blogger – sharing your thoughts — just doing it on other websites.

In fact, that's one of the biggest mistakes that I see online business owners make is keeping all of their content on their own sites and not sharing it on others.

How Can You Learn More about How to Get One-Way Links?

Again – Susanne is the queen link builder. If you want to learn the basics of Link Building, again, here’s here course  -> Beginner Link Building Course

Warmly,
Nicole Dean

PS. Please post your favorite method for building incoming links to your site below. Thank you!

I've mentioned it before and I'll say it again… I love Web Traffic. It's a goooood thing.  And, that's what we're going to talk about today. Specifically traffic from Google.

In fact, Google sends my websites a nice bit of traffic.  Here are my stats from last year for two of my niche websites. (Not this blog.  They are two of my other sites.)

This shows how many web visitors that Google sent to each site during 2009.

and

As you can see, Google sent each of these sites over 300,000 visitors. Like I said, web traffic is a goooood thing.

How on earth do I get Google (and Yahoo and Bing) to send me hundreds of thousands of web visitors each year? Simple. Marketing. Specifically link building… which we'll talk about in just a minute.

Now, you guys know me well enough by now to know that I preach quality over quantity – and building a business that lasts the test of time. So, if you're looking for automated, spammy link-building tips today, you'll be sorely disappointed.

However, if you'd like to learn more about Link Building the right way, I've got some Link Building FAQs for you. I invited my good friend, Susanne Myers, here again to chat – and this time, I'll add my thoughts, too.

And, as a reminder, Susanne teaches a course in Beginner Link Building if you'd like to learn more about this topic.

Just click here to get started -> Beginner Link Building Course

On to the Link Building FAQs…

First, What Is Link Building?

Susanne says: Link building is the process of creating (one way or another) links on other pages across the internet that point back to pages of your own websites.

Me: Link building is getting other websites to link to your website. For example, if you like this blog post, you are free to link to it from your blog. Talk about it in a blog post and link back to it. See how easy that is?

Why Is Link Building Important?
Susanne says: Links help other people and search engines find your site. In other words, links are one of the most important things to get traffic.

Me: Link building is important for two reasons.

1. Sites like Google, Yahoo, and Bing look at how many other websites link to your site to determine how valuable and important your site is. So, for instance, a site like WebMD.com or CNN.com that is informative and is considered an authority site has tons and tons of incoming links to it. While you don't have to compete with those sites, I use it as an example to show that valuable sites get linked to.
2. The other main reason that link building is important is that having links on other websites gives you a much better chance at having people run across the links and click through them to your website. So, it's not just about the search engines. It's about placing links on sites where real people read the info and will click through to learn more about what you offer.

The combination of the two is extremely powerful. And, if you do it right, it's unstoppable traffic.

How Many Links Do I Need To Get?
Susanne says: That really depends.

My goals for building links are always to:

1. Get traffic directly from the link. (From people clicking on my link.)
2. Move up in the search engines for my keyphrase for that particular page.

The more links and the higher quality the links you are building the better. For SEO purposes, keep building links until you are #1 on google for your search terms and for traffic, just take advantage of any and all link opportunities.

Me: It's an ongoing process. I recommend that you do something “Marketing-related” every single day to get links to your website… forever.

What Are The Best Ways To Get Links?
Susanne says: I have two different ways of getting links. Some I actively create and others that are generated on auto pilot. Let me give you a few examples for each.

Active Link Building

• Write and submit articles to article directories
• Write and submit articles to quality sites in your niche
• Write guest posts for popular blogs in your market place
• Participate in forums in your niche linking back where applicable and in your forum signature line. (Make sure you comply with forum rules before posting any links).
• Leave valuable blog comments on blogs in your niche.

Passive Link Building

• Create a “Link To Me” Page that explains that it is ok to link to any page on your site and invites readers to grab links and buttons with simple copy and paste code that they can add to their own pages.
• Add a Share This button to your blog. It will allow people to bookmark and email your link. There are several wordpress plugins out there that will do this and automate the process of using social bookmarking sites, twitter, facebook etc.
• Write great content that people want to link to. Answer most commonly asked questions, create a list of resources, write a report or record a video. Create something of value and share it with your readers letting them know that it’s ok to link to this page.

Me: I love Susanne's answer. The only things I'd recommend in addition are Video Marketing and doing a lot of interviews on other people's sites — like this one.

Can I Just Buy Links?
Susanne says: Yes, you can, but it’s not a good idea. In the eyes of the search engines buying links on a site is cheating and they are constantly working on finding those links and punishing the sites that are involved in link buying schemes. In other words, if you value your site and your traffic, just don’t do it.

You can however outsource a lot of link building tasks. This basically means that you pay someone else to go out and post valuable comments on blogs, participate in forums or hire a writer to ghost write blog posts and articles for you.

Me: I'm with Susanne on this one. While there are shortcuts, I don't recommend purchasing links, especially when marketing is FUN! (Well, if you're geeky like me, it is.)

How Can I Learn More about Link Building?

Again – Susanne is the queen link builder. If you want to learn the basics of Link Building, again, here's here course  -> Beginner Link Building Course

I hope this was helpful!

Please let us know if you have additional questions by commenting below. We're happy to keep answering questions as long as you keep asking.

Have a great day!

Warmly,
Nicole

A few days ago, we started talking about what link building is and why it is so important. I'm sure by now you are anxious to go out and start building one-way links, but before you do that, there are a few things you need to have in place to make sure your link building efforts are worthwhile. These are all things you need to have in place on your own site first.

#1 Keywords – The first thing you want to do is a little keyword research. I like to pick a keyword for each new page on my website. For example, for this blog post I chose the keyword “building one-way links” even before I wrote the first word. I then created a title and the content for this post around the keyword I would like this post to rank for.

#2 Great Content – Next, you need to sit down and write some great content. Each of your pages is going to have a goal, something you want to accomplish with it (more on that in #3). In order to reach your goal you first have to impress your readers with some really good content. Put some thought into what you are writing. Make sure it is well laid out and easy to follow. I do this by creating a quick little outline before I write the actual post.

Make sure you also include your keyword in both the title and the first 100 words of your post or article.

#3 Call To Action– Last but not least you want your readers to do something at the end of your post. This could be joining a mailing list, buying your product, checking out an affiliate offer or just leaving a comment. No matter what you would like them to do next, it is important that you tell them. It's called a “Call To Action” and if you keep reading you will read mine shortly.

Once you have those three things in place it's time to start building links. Your first few links should come from your own website. These are called internal links and they will help make sure your new content is indexed quickly by the search engines.

If you are using a content management system like a WordPress blog for example, some of those links will be created for you automatically. If you have a static website, make sure you link to the article from a category page (i.e. your articles page ) and if possible from your home page. I suggest you use your keyword in the anchor text whenever possible.

Once all that is in place, it's time to start building one-way links to your new content. Nicole has some great resources on how to build links here.

I would also like to invite to join my link building class at EasyLinkLove.com. Over the course of 13 weeks we go over various things you can do to build incoming links including social media, link directories, link exchanges, article marketing and guest blogging.

Did you catch that? The invitation to join my link building course was my call to action. Now go sign up
http://www.easyplr.com/r/getlinks

She'll be here this week, talking about Link Building (specifically for Beginners).

You may be wondering “Who the heck is she to teach link building?”

Well, let me tell you…

She has gotten over 50,000 incoming links to one of her sites in under 2.5 years.

(that's no typo)

What does that mean, exactly? And, why are links important?

1. Having links on other websites to yours get people to click through to your websites.If you've got links to your website all over the net, people will run into those and click through them. That's a gooooood thing. (People have wallets to spend money on your stuff.)

2. Having lots of links TO your website tells the search engines that your website is important. That way Google, MSN, Yahoo, and all the rest know you're a “real” site with “real” value.

However, I won't steal Susanne's thunder. I'll hand the stage to her.

What's the Buzz about Link Building?

By Guest Blogger Susanne Myers

I’m sure you’ve been hearing a lot about link building lately. Every six months or so it suddenly becomes the “hot” topic of the week usually at the same time some new course or piece of software is released by one of the big internet gurus. But here’s the thing…  link building is something you should be doing consistently throughout the year.

Nicole was nice enough to invite me to talk to you about link building for the next couple of days. We’ll talk about what link building is and why it is important today. The next post will be about what you need to have in place before you ever start to build links to your site and then we’ll chat a bit about effective link building and how you can fit it into your busy schedule.

What Is Link Building

Definition for Beginners: Link building is the process where you go out to other websites across the internet and through various methods (many of them are free) and get them to link to one of the pages on your website. This can be done in a variety of ways.

Here are just a few examples:

Link Exchanges – These used to be all the rage and worked very well a few years ago. You would simply ask a website owner to link to your website and would offer to do the same for them.

Article Marketing – Every time you write and submit an article to an article directory or another website, you are including an author resource box with a link back to your site. That’s a link building strategy – a really good one in fact and one I am dedicated two lessons to in my 13 week link building class.

Guest Blogging – Do you remember when Nicole went on her guest blogging tour last summer? She gained a lot of exposure and traffic, but also a lot of powerful links to various pages on her site. Guest blogging is another great link building strategy.

Link To Me Page – Something as simple as setting up a page on your blog or website that tells people how they can link back to you can be effective over time. You’ll be surprised how many fans of your site would love to help spread the word for you but don’t realize that they can link to you.

Those are just a few link building strategies.

If you’d like to learn more, I invite you to take my beginner link building class were we’ll cover those strategies and more in great detail.

Why Is Link Building Important

But why do you need to worry about building links in the first place? Let me answer that question with another question. Could you use some more traffic, more people to your website and thus more subscribers and more customers? I’m sure you could, I know I can.

Link building is how both visitors and search engines find you in the first place. Think back on a time (maybe even today) when you were surfing the web, going from page to page, clicking on links and coming across some really neat stuff. You wouldn’t have found those sites if other websites didn’t link to those.

More importantly though, incoming links will help you rise in the search engine rankings. Let’s say you sell an ebook on underwater basket weaving. Just imagine how much traffic and how many buyers you could get to your website if you were the first page to come up in Google anytime someone types in “underwater basket weaving”.

Link building is one of those things that should always be on your mind and more importantly something you should do on a regular basis. Let me share with you how I go about building links and how I was able to accumulate well over 70,000 links pointing to just one of my niche websites.

Sign up today at How to Get Links: A Course for Beginners

Thanks, Susanne, for stopping by. I look forward to more posts from you this week.

Warmly,
Nicole Dean

PS. I'm an SEO geeky type person. But, when I have a question about SEO, I go straight to Susanne. So, if you're ready to rise up through the Search Engines, be sure to check out her course.

Before I hit “send” I realized that this information can probably help more people, so I asked Lain if she would mind if I shared the discussion here. She's a sweetie and said “go for it”.

Here's the conversation…

Hi Nicole-

I was thrilled to discover your success cast. It's very educational and inspiring. I just listened to the Susanne Myers Interview, and she had so much great content and advice! I like hearing what Internet marketing “gurus” have to say, but I always take their advice with a grain of salt – after all, it sometimes seems that the only people making money online are those telling others how to make money online! But her story was so true and honest, and she's actually been there in the trenches doing what she turns around and suggests to the listeners. Wow!

I listened over and over and took notes about her advice on what she'd do if she had to start over from scratch. Amazing!

I would like to learn more about how to get incoming links on my website, but I haven't found much on that topic.

Can you possibly help steer me in the right direction?

Also, I was interested in knowing if you sponsor any training programs, or if you do coaching. Out of all the Internet marketers, I think I resonate most to what you have to say. I love how much you love your mom, too! It's so sweet. You're a real person, not some used-care salesman.

I believe in offering quality content to help people improve their lives, first and foremost. I don't want to automate a business selling something people don't need, or take part in some shell game or pyramid scheme. You seem so honest and real, and that matters to me.

Thanks for all you do-

Lain Ehmann – www.getscraphappy.com
Life doesn't have to be perfect to be good.

Hi Lain,

First of all, I LOVE your blog. I just got sucked in when I clicked through your link. Your writing is very genuine and heartfelt. I love it.

Second, thank you for the kind words. They mean the world to me.

As for your question, my belief is that 80-90% of your efforts during your day should be spent “off” site, rather than “on” your site. Yep. That means time spent actually marketing your products and services Well, that is IF it's a blog that you want to make money. Personal blogs are different, of course. But, the ones that need traffic to support your family – be doing at least one marketing activity per day (that not counting blog commenting or time on Twitter).

My awesome helper said she sent you the link to WebTrafficBasics.com to help you with some basic link building – it's an older course and needs to be updated, but it's still solid, and still free.

As for me, my one-on-one coaching rates are really high – just to try to protect my time a bit, so I really hesitate to send you to the page. I mostly work with infoproduct sellers who have a stream of income that I can help them to boost.

Actually, Susanne does have a link building course now. Just click here to get started -> Beginner Link Building Course

There are $300-$3000 courses that I could recommend, but I think you'll get more than what you need in that course. I trust Susanne 100% when I have questions about Link-Building so I recommend her course without hesitation.

Warmly,
Nicole

Here's a full tutorial I created just for you. It's a “scheme-free” and “hype-free” zone. Just the facts, ma'am.

http://www.webtrafficbasics.com/

Please let me know if you have questions!
Nicole