Backlinks: The Backlinks Black Belt Report

Now I want to outline some additional strategies to boost the power of GS in your online marketing efforts.

In the previous post on GS, I discussed Google’s (free) Wonder Wheel – here is a page that I have created showing this research process in action.

I should also reveal that I have just created my first GS site using MOST of George’s principles, but I have added a few extra twists which I go into below.

The differences in my approach are that I have installed a free WP plugin from here called Sticky Frontpage Categories and Tags. This plugin works in a slightly unusual way in that you add a category or tag to the post that you want stuck to the front of your blog, add that tag or category to the post (don’t forget to update the post so the new tag or category is added) and then tell the plugin to stick all posts with that particular tag or category to the front page.

I have created a page with screen pics of this WP plugin process here and you can download this free helpful WP plugin here.

Now, why would I want to stick a particular post to the front page of my GS blog?

Well, unlike George’s process, I want my GS sales page – the one with the story or review on it – to be my FIRST post so that I can immediately start backlinking it and (as will be discussed below) earning and learning from it. George normally recommends putting in the filler posts to get the whole GS site indexed first and then the sales one is last. Now even though that sales post is my homepage, I only backlink the post URL e.g. instead of backlinking www.mygssite.com, I ONLY backlink www.mygssite.com/category/this-is-the-name-of-my-post.

This is backlinking from INNER pages elsewhere to INNER pages on my GS blog – just like a naturally viral article and that is what our backlinking is simulating. And don’t forget that the Googlebots like to see new daily posts of fresh material (I bought 40 PLR articles in the niche for $5). Once Google sees CONSISTENT daily posts (just use PLR with WPUnique), your new posts will get crawled very quickly (use Google Alerts to monitor it).

Here, I’m speeding up the process with the above plugin and getting linkbuilding moving (which takes time to take effect anyway). Over the coming days, I will add a PLR article on my niche topic into my new GS blog each day making sure that each post is masked with another plugin, WPUnique (not free) (you must tell each individual post to be ‘uniqued’ so watch that trap). As these new posts are added to my GS site, they WON’T bump off my sales page from the front and will just go into the site’s overall content.

Now, in case you haven’t figured this part out yet, GS has TWO crucial lynchpins on which success, trips to Provence and new sports cars rests:

- the site’s organic Google ranking; and,

- the ability of the sales letter to convert.

Of these two, the second must be your MAXIMUM priority (yeah, yeah, I’m the backlinking guy, but let me explain). If a sales page is NOT converting (I’m there at the moment on a couple of sites), a high search engine ranking is completely pointless.

But why wait the month or so that George suggests it takes an On-Page SEO-optimised site to get decent rankings for a new GS site?

What if you wait all that time and the sales letter sucks and nothing is happening sales-wise?

That can feel like time wasted.

The solution – though I’m not normally a big fan of it – is PPC (mainly for testing though it can be added as a separate strategy until organic rankings kick in). With my just-created GS site which has only two posts and the sales story page stuck to the front of the blog, I am running a small-ish PPC campaign to see if the traffic to that brand new GS page is converting. Now I know that PPC traffic is not as good as organic usually but it will give me some insight into how it’s doing. Imagine that, build a new GS site with one post – your sales page – and have it getting clicks within half an hour.

In fact PPC is VERY useful in other ways too.

If we look at the current AdWords’ ads running on our niche keyword SERPs (and check how long they have been running it through a great tool like Keyword Elite’s AdWords Time Machine), they will be using certain ‘hooks’ to attract YOUR prospects on that page. Those are hooks that we want to build into our sales story.

But let’s go a step further.

If a company has been running an expensive AdWords ad on that niche keyword for some time, their sales page will be converting (many of them are awful but seem to work).

So why not visit the sales pages of these successful operators in your niche (and the more competitive, shorter keyword versions in that niche) and especially note the bullet points they use to convert their visitors. Now some won’t have bullet points but will be using other hooks. Copy those hooks and integrate them into your sales page story/review – this is free market research that they have spent a lot of money on.

With my PPC campaign, the ClickBank payout is roughly $20 per sale and I have set my clicks to a maximum of 50 cents each. So I need one conversion per 40 clickthroughs to break even while I fine tune my sales letter (partly by getting ideas from other successful sales letters in my niche).

I cannot emphasise how important it is to develop a converting sales letter. It is pure gold for your business. Your whole IM future could hang on it – to a certain degree.

Once you have one that is converting well, you can buy banner ads on relevant forums (where testing is essential too of course), buy ads on successful blogs/websites on a flat-monthly-fee basis etc. Here it is essential to understand and measure the metrics of your business. By doing that, you are adding additional traffic streams to your GS site while or instead of waiting for organic search rankings to improve.

Furthermore, once you have your sales story fine tuned and that page is converting well, go after ALL possible keywords in that niche with either other GS sites OR optimised pages on the successful site for those terms. By using WPUnique, you could have virtually the same sales letter on the same site but targeting a different keyword in the same niche.

You can see now why successful sales letter writers get thousands of dollars for one page of copy!

Frank Kern is a huge fan of story based sales pages and I am going to experiment with this a lot more as there’s no doubt some sense of identification with the storyteller is a powerfully persuasive approach. Where possible (like when you stumble across other Google Sniper sites), look, analyse and learn from the good and bad points in their preselling storywriting.

Here’s an example of one of my recent Sniper-style story sales pages in a GoArticle:

http://www.goarticles.com/cgi-bin/showa.cgi?C=1631257 (I’m not 100% happy with it yet and am watching what happens CTR/Conversion-wise – actually commenter Matt’s feedback would be welcome on my presell story there).

Let me put it this way. If you had a great storytelling technique in under 500 words and could be driving traffic to a new site within 30 minutes of its creation through PPC, what would hold you back from being very, very successful in IM?

Now, let me answer some comment questions:

Hey Terry,

Great information as usual!

I am just wondering, if you allocate a single post to the front page, will the home page still show as http://www.domain.com OR http://www.domain.com/post_name

Also, will the post be clickable as it is usually, so it will then be taken to http://www.domain.com/post_name

Finally, do you then create a new page for the other posts? If so, how do you go about that?

Thanks for all your great stuff!

You Rock!

Dennis

Thank you Dennis. Hopefully my discussion about the free plugin above and picture page make that clear. Comment again here if not or PM me on Warrior Forum if not.

The home page can be BOTH www.mygsdomain.com or (if the title of the front page post is clicked on) www.mygsdomain.com/category/this-is-my-sales-letter-title-post. The latter one is what I backlink for the reasons above. The post will still be clickable. Try that plugin and see for yourself. New ‘pages’ are automatcially created for new posts BUT they don’t push your sales page off the front like a normal WP blog which automatically shows the most recent post (not to be confused with Pages, a separate thing in WP).

Agreed it’s going to take a bit more than a few posts and backlinks to crack most decent markets. You might get lucky otherwise but that would be the exception not the rule.

If I saw a site ranking well using the more simplistic approach it could easily be beat with putting in a bit more work in.

That’s it London Affiliate – well said!

I don’t use GS but I use a similar approach to building minisites. I have found that building backlinks is a necessity to keep my sites ranking well.

Right on Karen and all of what I discuss here about GS can be applied to any Internet Marketer’s sites.

I learn so much from you. Trying to digest it all and use what I’m learned and am learning in a new site I am going to build. My main site is my joy and I do want to make money form but I see that I can make money quicker with single products and single focused pages, blogs then full blows sites.

I’m also trying to get the idea of ‘backlinking the inner post page with the sales letter-nothing else.’ I have the same question Dan does.

Thank you Dez. My best advice is not to build too many sites too quickly. Make the ones you have great and apply the tactics above to fine tune your craft on a few sites. If you have too many (I have over 40 which is too many), many get neglected. Just one good GS-type site properly tweaked and promoted through various channels could earn a handsome living. I think I’m coming to Dan’s question soon but let me clarify it here.

This tactic is straight from the SEO samurai at Stompernet but that’s not why I recommend it. I recommend it beacuse it has worked very well for me. With backlinking, we are replicating the illusion of an article or post going viral across the net. If Warren Buffet wrote a great article on the credit crunch tomorrow and it was somewhere on the CNN site, nobody would link to CNN.com ‘naturally’. They would link from their INNER page to CNN’s INNER page where the Buffet story was. We are copying the same – it looks more natural, deep linking. I COMPLETELY ignore backlinking my hompepage but then Google shows that in the SERPS instead of the INNER page (usually) anyway and will often give a valuable ‘double indented listing’ of my homepage AND the backlinked INNER page.

Hey Terry,

Great post mate,

I have been through Google Sniper and built half a dozen sites, relatively fast too, and one in particular took me 1 day to build and with in 3 weeks was making $150 a week…BUT you are dead right, I went after higher competition and blitzed that baby with back links.

Finding those low competition keywords with the right search volume is horribly painful in my opinion, especially when some consistent back linking can snatch you are nice volume keyword.

The problem I am finding with Sniper sites, that you touched on above is that all my links are pointing to the root domain, and not the posts, and although its ok now, I wonder if Google will slap me for that…mmm…lets hope not.

Thanks for all your great insight Terry

Cheers
Matt

Hi Matt, thanks for the support and awesome to hear about your success with GS (work that site hard through the channels mentioned above in this post and you’ll be making money from it for literally years). The really cool thing about perennial problem-solving-related sites is that they have new appeal to each new mini-generation that comes along – apparently 1 million people a week go on to the internet for the very first time, for example! Ever notice how Hollywood unleashes a new wave of vampire-related TV shows and films every 5 years – a new mini-generation of teenagers who were 8-10 in the last wave are now in the prime zone for vampire stuff at 13-15.

Hopefully the backlinking will open up new possibilities for you (not to mention PPC and forum/blog paid advertising). My first GS site has 200,000+ competitors by George’s “in quotes” sniff-test gauge.

Slap-wise, you’ll be fine Matt (otherwise competitors would ruin their rivals’ sites this way) but do some INNER post linking via the free plugin above as that sales-page post will be your homepage (kind of) now anyway.

Terry this is truly some great info!! when you talk about you only backlink your inner pages will that in turn help the top level url? BTW i think your war room thread is the best IM infotmation i have ever come across.

Thank you Mike – hopefully I covered this inner page issue above.

exellent points. I too found it a bit discouraging trying to find these impossible buying keywords that weren’t overly competitive.

Terry-you said “I would ONLY backlink the inner post page with the sales letter – nothing else.”

Can’t this get you in a bit of trouble though? If Google sees the linking pattern ONLY going to the index or “sticky” post wouldn’t they seee this an unnatural backlinking pattern and devalue your links?(since people in reality link to all sorts of inner pages as well)

Do you have a recommended resource to find good outsourcers to backlink? Or a specific outsourcing approach that works best?

Thanks Frank. In theory it could look unnatural if only one post had loads of links but that has worked very well for me. True viral articles must have a massive imbalance of inbound links on a site but those would at least have a few to the other pages. When this tactic becomes less effective, I’ll start backlinking the others. Interestingly, this site that you are reading this on had reached the bottom of Page 1 on Google for the term ‘backlinks’ when it only had one post (the one backlinked and unusually, this is the one showing up in the SERPs). According to George’s ’sniff test’, I have 2.7 million competitors on that term but consistent backlinking of one inner page post has gotten me there in roughly 4 months. That’s the power of this technique – imagine how many keywords it opens up for your GS sites!

Terry

Excellent analysis and thank you for this well researched information.

I am not familiar with “Analyticator”. What does it do?

On-page seo, as you mentioned, is really a minor factor compared to backlinks – I have also proven that fact with some very competitive keywords.

Cheers
leon

Thanks Leon. Analyticator is a free WP plugin (available here) that hooks up with your Google Analytics account and gives you all that usual Analytics info that would get from a normal HTML site being tracked there.

Excellent post Terry! I am along the same lines of thinking you are in regards to expanding on the GS system.

I am using WP unique for all my GS sites and feel it’s working out great. I’ll definitely look into the other plugins you suggested.

I also am creating several web 2.0 platforms as primary feeders to both rank on page 1 and funnel link juice and traffic to my main site.

As for back linking, I use a diversified linking strategy, although I have been able to lower the degree of the linking campaigns with the GS system which is nice as it saves time and effort compared to bigger projects.

One thing I would appreciate you expanding upon for me so I understand it correctly… “Google likes Posts more than Pages and I would ONLY backlink the inner post page with the sales letter – nothing else.”

The inner post page, you are referring to the very first post of your site? You wouldn’t put any effort into back links for any of the other posts or pages following the original post?

Another thing I’d love your opinion on and have not yet tested myself but plan to, is adding a youtube video and outbound link to a site like wikipedia. I know this goes down the road of getting away from the original steps of the system, but do you see any cons to doing so.

I would make the ending of the youtube video extend for about 5 mins longer so the visitor isn’t encourage to click off to youtube and only include one outbound link to something like wikipedia. Basically do you think adding these elements would pull the visitor away from the adsense block?

Anyway, I’m rambling. Thanks for a great post and your time and attention to my comments.

Hiya Rhab. Thanks for your comments and questions.

WP pages lack the categories and tags of posts in their URLs and they don’t seem as ’sexy’ to Google though I haven’t exhaustively tested this so I could be completely wrong on that. Interestingly, I included an outbound Wikipedia link from my new GS site sales page – mainly to please a human reviewer at Google AdWords. It can’t hurt – if the link is low down and unlikely to ‘intercept’ the clicking of your visitor before they hit your aff links. With the YouTube video, test, test, test. I like using them partly because they can have great content but also they increase the average visit time of visitors to your site and – theoretically – that is meant to please Google as you seem to be provifing a good ‘user experience’. Sounds like you and I are on the same wavelength there Rhab! Scary, huh?

I’m not a fan of Adsense but haven’t tinkered much with it, the amount of money that Google shares with publishers is outrageous and appalling. John Reese has a great idea on AdSense: keep a note of the sites that pop up in your AdSense block and if the same ones keep appearing (and you have good rankings and traffic) approach the site webmaster directly for a direct flat-rate ad deal on your homepage as they may have already deliberately targeted your site in their AdWords campaign setup. As John rightly states, you will make far more from direct advertising deals than the miserly pennies from AdSense.

I will respond to comments in the next post on GS but I really hope you’ve gotten plenty out of these two Google Sniper posts. George has actually asked me to put all this stuff in a video fro the GS training area so I mustn’t have offended him too much!

Take care.

Best regards

Terry Kyle.