I will probably release a thrashing Commenting Blueprint Ebook somewhere in the future of my blogging career, and I don’t want to drop it all here… But I am busy preparing some stellar marketing for Blog Engage and thought I would share some tips with you top add some value to your experience here at Blog Engage.

Sure, this is by no means rocket science or a revelation,  but new bloggers could really benefit from this and hopefully some of the more seasoned bloggers here will also benefit somewhat.

Link building 101.

If you want links built through commenting that actually mean something, you want to look for blogs with the following criteria:

1. The blog needs to be nofollow-free (or dofollow).
2. It should have KeywordLuv installed so that you can place your name and your desired keyword in the ‘name’ part of the comment section.
3. It should have ComLuv installed (Premium) because it will allow you to choose from the last ten posts from your blog you’d like to promote.
4. It needs to have a PR higher than 3.
5. It needs to have an Alexa rank below 100k.

Well, those were the criteria I looked at in my preparation doing marketing for Blog Engage. The list is not finished yet, but right now there’s around 28 GOOD blog on there. The above is not the valuable part of this post but the following is:

The most valuable part.

There’s still a lot of research for me to do, but as I searched for Comluv enabled blogs, I happened to come upon a search engine that Karen from Blazing Minds actually have installed on her blog. I don’t know which search engine she’s using (looks like a Google type), but here’s the link. From there I was able to get 28 nofollow free, high PR, Low Alexa ranking blogs.

Until the fat lady…

Nope I’m not done yet, I will be searching for some more blogs to go and ‘invest’ some time into and once I have 50 or so, I’m going to start cutting them off by measuring against the first list of criteria.

Your turn.

Do you know where else I can ‘shop’ for blogs to go market at, except of course the Blazing minds list, all the A-list bloggers and looking at the Comluv bloggers list. Is there anywhere else you know of I can go and ‘do some research’.

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Hello my Blogengage Buddies!

You may have caught some of my previous topical posts on the value of  Blogengage as an online business resource; when I shared what Blogengage did for my online business or even how it compares to other link building services.

Well, today I’m going to stun you with some screenshots. And I’m gonna be brief here, because as they say:

Proof is in the pudding.

I mentioned before how many links I’ve built to my blog since using Blogengage. You may remember me having some trouble with a hacker having Google block my blog completely. Well, it forced me to go into my webmaster page and to my BIG SURPRISE i saw the following:

As you can see, ExtremeJohn is also there, but 17,278 dofollow links from Blogengage, recognized by Google? I have an idea the next time my PR rating is updated it’s going to be through the roof!

Okay, if you look at my profile,   you’ll see I’ve joined 2011-05-25. That makes the above stats IMPRESSIVE. But all the more so the stat below:

Because I’m not really into SEO (imagine I was!), Google don’t refer much traffic to me. Also behind Blogengage is Facebook (not very active there either). And then Blogengage #7 after BIG ones like Twitter, Feedburner and Stumbleupon.

The awesome thing about those stats above is the following:

• I’ve been on Twitter since the inception of my blog, building, ReTweeting, engaging etc. All the Golden Twitter Rules.
• I’ve been a member on Blogengage for 3 months, and only really using their service effectively for about 1 and a half months.
• My old posts are automatically stumbled.

So, you can see that besides looking at comparable value , you can surely see Blogengage is one of those ‘traffic secrets’ one is reluctant to share with others.

Your Turn.

Why haven’t you joined Blogengage and invested in one of our services yet?

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Hello friends. I spoke a little last week of What Blogengage Did for my Online Business and I explained how it builds links and creates a TON of opportunities – being the best investment I’ve made for building links and generating traffic. Dollar for Dollar there’s really no better investment you COULD make at this point what traffic and link building is concerned.

And my expenditure on traffic plans and ‘magic formula’ programs to date is approx. $3000. Can you believe it? Yeah, I made some very bad purchase decision the last year.

So, let’s look at some online link building services.

EdgeLink gives you 200 links in a month for $299.

Having read limited info of LinkVine, they offer their site as an article directory for $67. So, you do all the work of writing articles for backlinks.

WebSearchEngineRanking gives you 390+ links for $99 and it takes 1-2 months to complete.

BackLinkBuild gives you measily 45 baclinks for $295 (I hope their customers are doing their research!).

Links-Building offers 250 one way links for $370. They also offer comment services of 200 comments for $220.

Expensive isn’t it? And those are on the first page of Google for the term ‘Link Building Services’

Let’s look at some traffic generation services.

SagarDesign would send you 5,000 visitors for $20. And those aren’t targeted.

Not sure of the math, but TrafficSage gives you around 489 unique visitors per month for $497 per month.

Online techniques gives you exposure to 58 different platforms for $100.

Well, that’s it for page one.

Now, let’s get to the good stuff.

Blogengage is like a double edged sword what your online promotion is concerned. It’s like article marketing, because you or your team writes articles on your blog, or blog posts. It get’s fed to BE through a RSS aggregation service Brian provides. What are the results? Well, I can only give you my own results (after two months of use).

Dofollow links built: 720

Traffic: 376 unique, recurring readers.

Pages per visit: 2.57

Are you ready for the most amazing stat?

Bounce Rate: 50% Yep, believe it.Note: Jumpvine sends me traffic and is the #3 referrer but gives me a bounce rate of 96.76 and 1.75 pages. Sometimes quality is better than quality.

Need I say more? What did all this cost me?

$9.99/month.

I know.

That’s why I have signed up for the business account of $29.99 where I have TONS of feeds to add. So, I gave one feed to each one of my writers as an incentive of writing for my blog and I am adding all my other blogs to them (even if I’m not actively promoting them) and all my offline, local clients are also fed through it.

What are you waiting for? Get your deals by clicking the image below.

Add the Blog Engage image to your sidebar and support our growing community.

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Hello Blogengage family.

I’ve made another two videos to show you some hidden, helpful features and tricks that you may want to start facilitating in your BlogEngage marketing strategy.

Here are the points I look at:

• Switching between the list and expanded view of published posts.
• How to make the most of commenting; growing your Karma score and Be user rank along with links to your blog.
• Why friending is important, especially if you want to chat with certain people.
• Voting on your own posts?

Share your thoughts with me after you watched the videos. Are you using these and how is it working for you?

Official 2011 Guest Blogging Contest Post #12
Contest Article
2011 Best Guest Blogger Contest Article – Not Completed Yet

Any webmaster that has not been sleeping under the rock from ever since search engines came into existence will know that building back links is the best way to gain authority and rank high in serps. There are plenty of old school ways to build back links, you know the drill, submit to article directories, web directories, press release, guest posting, link exchange, etc. everyone does that. So what is keeping you above the competition? Nothing, which is why you too are struggling. In this article, we will talk about certain ways of building back links that you might not have considered yet.

Finding a dead resource – This might sound strange at first, but this is my best link building method till date. First search for a dead website or a blog on your niche. Then check out the back links that it had. You can use Google or Yahoo search to do it. Once you find a few good sites linking on that dead resource, (and when I say a few you might just be surprised to find plenty of A-list blogs and .gov and .edu sites linking them), start contacting them. Tell them that the list they are maintaining is good and it is very helpful, but you found a site on that list that is no longer live. The reference list might be an article with a further reading link or it could be a list of related sites to that article, either way you just need to point them out that the particular link is dead and that you have a good replacement for that dead site. Yes, your own.

A spelling error – This is easy, just think about a typo of your keyword that you want to rank for. Once you get a few variation of your keyword, start searching them on the search engines. You will get a few results; even bigger websites do mistakes sometimes. Once you have the results, start contacting them and tell them that they have a spelling error on their content. Also, tell them in the same email that you have a related website and it will be great if they mention it somewhere as in returning the favour. This works, but the success rate is not as high as the first method. None the less, it is a free way to get back links, so why not try it.

Testimony – Testimonials are a popular way of building back links but you need to use it properly. First find a service website that has a few testimonials and is giving do follow links to the testimonials that are already available. Next, search out the cheapest service that they provide and take it. Pay for it in advance or at the end of their service as suggested by them. Once the service is completed, send them a thanking email along with your testimony about their service. Lie through your teeth and tell them how good their service is, even if it is not. If it is really that bad and you feel a bit of pain on your conscience about talking good about it, then leave it and move on in your search for another service website.

Images – Images are a great way to build back links. Have you seen so many websites that actually give a dofollow credit link for the images? Those same sites give nofollow credit links to related sites, but for the images they give dofollow, lame as it sounds, but for us, it is a good thing. For this, buy some images and use them in your articles and make sure to give a credit link for the image on the same page as the article. You can use flickr to upload the image under the creative common license with attribution enabled. Though, here I would suggest that you upload a very small resolution image on the flickr and upload the original image on your website and link it from the flickr. This small little tip will help you get the source credit link of the image as your own blog and not the flickr page.

Just ask – have you considered this, of course you have. But if you do a link exchange, as in site wide blog roll links, it might not work as much. For this idea to have greater effect, try linking from the article. Write a new article and link a fellow blogger’s article from it. Then email that blogger and tell him that you have linked him and that can he return the favour. If he can, you got a good link back and perhaps many more links to come.

Build back links creatively, that way you will get plenty of ways to build them. Am not saying that you should not follow the old school, time tested and proven ways of building back links, do it by all means, however just don’t limit yourself to that. All I want to advice is, just be a bit creative in building back links.

When I first decided to explore the possibility of using Ebay for traffic generation, what I was really looking for was a back-burner hands-off strategy.

Understandably so: our business life is already overtaken by humongous to-do lists, which let’s face it will never get done as it is. I remember one of my readers suggesting to rename them “wish lists” – for obvious reasons.

However, as I did more and more research, I started to realize that Ebay might actually deserve a much more prominent place in your online business than just generating a few quick backlinks to your site.

Here’s what I mean.

What is your primary goal of working your behind off online? That’s right – to MAKE MONEY.

What is Ebay?

It’s a online hub where people come with their credit cards out READY TO BUY.

See the correlation?

You want to sell… they want to buy…

Just to drive this deeper: according to the latest numbers, Ebay has about 1.8 BILLION users in 2010. Even if this number is not entirely accurate, any number in billions is entirely plausible and believable… and huge!

Doesn’t it make sense for us to go where the traffic is?

Time for a disclaimer: I am in no way an Ebay traffic generation experts. All I am doing in this post is sharing various traffic generation/link building techniques that I came up with during my extensive Ebay research. I haven’t had a chance to test them out yet, so it will be up to you to implement, test, and refine these techniques.

In other words, there is some work involved in this, but since not too many people I noticed are doing this, the payoff could be huge!

I assume that you already have an Ebay account; if not, that’s where you should start.

Set Up Your Ebay “Presence”

1. Account:

if you don’t already have one, create an account with your site name as your user name. Just like you would when creating any social profile.

If you already have an account, you can still change your user name for your site name.

For instance, I change my user ID to “TrafficGenerationCafe“. To do that, I went to

My Ebay => Account=> Personal Information =>User ID =>Edit

2. “AboutMe” page:

Make sure it has links back to your site and an opt-in form.

To learn how to do that, visit the following post:

• Ebay For Link Building

3. “My World” page:

It’s accessible via http://myworld.ebay.com/

OPTIONAL: do the following 2 steps if you have actual products to sell or want to sell anything.

4. Open up a store:

Here’s the link: http://pages.ebay.com/storefronts/start.html

5. Add any digital products you’d like to sell.

Generate Traffic

Generating traffic through Ebay is all about funneling it properly.

Our objective is to direct all the traffic to your About Me page with your opt-in form there – best case scenario.

Second best is to funnel it through your MyWorld page, which can be connected to your Ebay store or your AboutMe page.

One thing for sure: whatever you do on Ebay, you want to make sure all roads lead to Rome – YOU.

Here are the two best strategies to generate traffic via Ebay:

1. Sell your products

In your listings, you are allowed to post any links within Ebay realm, which of course includes your About Me page.

You can sell simple guides on Ebay for 1 cent simply to have a listing out there to drive traffic back to your opt-in form.

Once you get someone to your listing, your job is to sell them on YOU, especially if you are using Ebay as a mere traffic generation machine.

Come up with a simple sales copy that shows off your knowledge on the subject and tell your visitors where they can get more of it, i.e. your AboutMe page.

I assume it’s self-explanatory, but I guess I need to mention it anyway:

THE ONLY place on Ebay you can use external links is your AboutMe page.

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

Copy successful listings and how they structured their offer. Figure out why they sold their product while another guy didn’t.

The smartest thing I’ve seen on Ebay was where a seller had an expensive product and they posted details for a webinar in the listing. They don’t have to pay Ebay’s fees and get new customers. Brilliant!

2. Write Ebay Reviews & Guides

http://reviews.ebay.com/

As it turned out, reviews on Ebay are not just about products. They can also be tips, advice, etc.

Take a look at this review I found that’s right up my alley:

Take a look at the links in red boxes:

-top left goes to her MyWorld page;

-top right to her feedback section, which is connected to her About Me page;

-bottom one goes to her Ebay Store, but can go to any one of your Ebay pages.

3. Additional Places to Spread Link Love:

Ebay Neighborhoods, Discussion Boards, Chat Rooms, Answer Center – you can find all these tools under “Community” tab when logged into your Ebay account.

Ebay Traffic Generation This & That

1. Domain Name

Purchase a domain name similar to your store. Forward the domain to your auction website. This will make advertising easier, as people have no problem visiting websites with real domain names.

2. Google Rankings

Yes, Ebay reviews and guides are included in Google search results.

Which means that with just a little bit of keyword research and on-page optimization your review just might end up on the first page of Google.

3. What To Avoid

Don’t bother with Ebay classified ads.

I tested them out and Ebay no longer allows you to include any links in your listings.

Not worth the trouble.

And now that you know about this incredibly underused Ebay traffic generation strategy, it’s time for a blatant plug.

As you know with post is a part of BlogEngage contest.

If you like what you read, don’t be shy and leave me a comment, send your followers a tweet, tell your Facebook friends about this awesome post you just read on BlogEngage.

Engage in other words!

Love it or hate it? Comment to show me that you’re alive!

Building high value backlinks to your site is the most critical aspect of marketing your website. It is so important that you will probably spend about 80% of your time working on it. After all, it does not matter how awesome your website is.  If nobody sees it you have wasted your time.

I see people every day submitting articles to hundreds of directories, and screaming in anguish over their lack of success with this dead strategy. The problem here isn’t that article marketing itself is dead, it is the way people go about it.

I was in the same boat myself, once upon a time. I was using a mass submitter, spinning articles all day long, using a blog network, and ripping my hair out over my lack of success. I realized that this was one of the biggest marketing blunders that I could be making.

Then I started really paying attention to where I was submitting my content. I realized that 90% of the sites that I submitted content to never got any visitors. I started seeing how posting high value backlinks got more traffic, by themselves, and increased my rankings over all. When I realized how easy it was, I almost slapped myself.

You need to focus on creating high quality content and posting it on sites that actually bring you traffic. Throwing thousands of backlinks out there just to get search rankings is a total waste of time. The search engines have gotten smarter over the years. They can tell if all your articles are coming from sites that never get any traffic.

So, where does this leave you?

Rather than mass submitting articles to hundreds of directories, there are many places that you can submit your articles without ripping out your hair in frustration. Find about 20-30 good social sites, join the community, and start posting your content on their sites. You can get a lot of traffic, and they will help build up your reputation.

Next, let me tell you about getting  high value backlinks by submitting original articles to a popular blog as a guest poster. Guest posting has become one of my favorite ways to build traffic. You can get more visitors from one well written guest post than you can by slaving away submitting to hundreds of directories. I recently posted about how to start a conversation with your blog over at FamousBloggers, and my traffic exploded.

Now, article directories are not totally useless. I recommend that you pick about 10 directories that either give you a decent amount of traffic, or get your articles republished to other people’s sites and newsletters. You need to look around to find these directories, but they are available.

Whatever your goal is online, you need high value backlinks to get into the groove. Don’t blunder your way around by submitting to worthless sites that never see any traffic. Also, always remember to use high quality, original content. There are so many great places to build backlinks, you don’t really need to use them. Get your links on blogs and social sites. If you focus your link building on sites that get a lot of traffic, you will get the rankings that you desire.  But you will also find that you really don’t rely on search engine rankings any more.

Blog Serp is fixed and once again welcomes blog website submissions. We allow bloggers to submit their urls once.

Unlike blog engage blog serp is not a article submission website it’s meant to be a blog directory.

So you would only submit your website once linking to your home page.

Blog Serp has been around for about two years now and has a page rank of three.

So take a minute sign up and submit your blog. It’s a great backlink and a very high quality website for blog links.

If you have any issues please simply post a reply here and I’ll take car of it.

Be sure to add me as a friend, bbrian017

Subscribe to my blog as well

Twitter, bbrian017

Thanks,

Brian