How to Create Links for Free and Generate Traffic
No, this is not too good to be true. There are actually many internet forums out there where you as a business owner can cultivate some free links that are fairly easy to do. Do not leave any stone unturned! Creating a free blog, posting a free ad, participating on forums or responding on a blog are all great ways to build free links to your website.
Yahoo! Answers is an easy way to start link building and drive traffic at the same time. It’s a great place to set yourself up as an expert in your field. If your site is related to finance and accounting services, then you can beef up your profile with information on all of your credits as a financial professional so that people will look to you for answers. Not only will your topics or responses rank well on Google but visitors will probably give more authority to your links and actually click on them.
If you take your time to look for people asking big financial questions within Yahoo! Answers, you can put yourself out there as an expert on how to avoid filing for bankruptcy, or what foreclosure entails, etc. You can then provide links to relevant resources out there and cause people to link to your site as well since it has so much to offer on the subject from you- the expert. The public wants to know!
Another area to build your clout as an expert is creating a Squidoo page, which you can do in a fairly quick amount of time. You can use that page to link to expert documents and many useful tools relating to your field (like IRS tax documents, etc.), all the while ultimately using it to link back to your site for the expert services that you offer in that area.
The users spend copious amounts of time in Squidoo looking for reputable pages that they can trust to give them the help and answers they are looking for. Once you establish that connection and get the ball rolling, then there is no stopping you! This site will prove to be a valuable tool in drawing more visits to your page from people looking for professional help in the services that your company provides to them. Meaning more links and traffic for you!
You can also create free pages on blog sites such as blogger.com and wordpress.com to address topics your target audience is interested in. This will help you attract your target audience while providing related content and help you build backlinks at the same time. If you do this right not only will your site rank on search engines for your target keyword but other pages you’ve created will as well.
Your next option is to submit a story to Digg that will link back to an article on your site, as this will cause many people looking for information on your subject and business area to be drawn back to you. If you submit even more content to Digg, you can then have some of its link authority direct back to your page, resulting in more visitors.
If you want to build links not to optimize your site but to generate traffic craigslist is a great option. When posting an ad on craigslist your ad (link to your site) is only temporary and will disappear when the ad expires. If you are offering a service, like a tax or accounting site for example, then you can put an ad out for yourself under the ‘Services’ section of Craigslist so that an Average Joe looking for tax and financial help in any part of the world will see a link on the ad which will push new traffic to your site.
These are just the tip of the iceberg in the creative ways that you can use internet forums to create free and easy links to your site. Think of all of the options out there so you can dig in and not miss out on these great internet marketing opportunities! I will note that as your company grows, many people choose to hire someone to work on this area of expertise for them and to spend time building up their various profiles and reputations on the sites mentioned here. That may be a viable option for you, since this is an area of marketing your business that should not be over looked. You can’t beat free!
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I used Yahoo! Answers regularly on weekends to drive more traffic during my freetime.
I just signed up for your newsletter because I found this article very interesting. I didn’t know Craigslist would help traffic to your site. I’m fairly new at this and I appreciate the way you explain things.
You post where and why things are important, not just a list which I find very helpful.
Great post, Bethany. These are handy reminders all in one spot. Other ideas to add to the list: Create a presentation and post to slide.com with a link back to your site. Create graphics or photos and upload to flickr with a link back to your site. Thanks again for this very useful article.
Melinda,
Slide.com
Flickr.com
Are also great options – thanks for mentioning them!
Peg,
Glad you signed up!
Linkedin.com also has a “Q & A” section similar to Yahoo! I spend a few minutes on this site every day. It’s very important to address each question from the perspective of a specialist/authority in the field.
What a fantastic tip! I had no clue LinkedIn had a Q&A section.
Also, the 10×10 Lay-flat books are a pretty great price on your site. How many pages does it come with? It says “extra pages” so i wasn’t quite sure how many come standard. Also, when it says a “minimum of 20″ is that 20 sides, or 20 actual pages (totaling 40 sides)…
I definitely should get cracking on the 10×20 honeymoon album I started like 2 years ago….. especially at those prices!
Not to throw a wet blanket on this article, but many of the recommended sites (particularly Y! Answers) are NO FOLLOW.
Yah, but link building isn’t the only marketing technique, so nofollow doesn’t particularly matter all of the time.
If you’re spending a particular portion of your time doing marketing to increase your search ranking in order to get search engine traffic, than yah, posting on Yahoo! Answers isn’t a good strategy.
But, marketing should be diversified. And maybe wedding DJs isn’t the best niche for Yahoo! Answers, so as the site owner, you need to pick and choose what marketing tools work best for you, and which ones don’t. (As does any online marketer.)
Yahoo! Answers would be very fantastic for a website about tax help (which would probably be an affiliate for tax software, or H&R block or something). If it’s a fairly new site, trying to rank high in the search engines before April 15th would be silly. But, I am sure there are hundreds upon hundreds of tax questions on Yahoo! Answers every single day, and if you spent a little bit of time answering those questions, and citing your website as the source of information, you could get people to your website. PLUS, since Yahoo! Answers has quite a bit of search engine authority, other people asking similar questions in Google may get sent to that page with your answer, and you can get organic visitors reading your answer to the question, and visiting your site as the resource. What a fantastic source of immediate and long term traffic, directly related to your niche!
Niche Titans is about more than just link building. it’s about niche marketing in general, and we will be providing tips to that aim. Is search engine optimization and link building a good way to generate traffic to your niche site? Absolutely! Is it the only way? Absolutely not!
Sacramento Weddings,
Yeah, we should have mentioned that while Yahoo! Answers provides links and traffic they do not hold link authority.
It’s been proven that no-follow links do add juice to your site but not much and too many can have a negative effect.
Yes, Bethany link building is a must but also as you said your internet marketing needs to be diversified and some options are going to be better for some websites than others.
Like most businesses it is a matter of planning your marketing and allowing a certain amount of time for the alloted activities.