How?

Well, I am not the originator of this idea so I’ll just link to this excellent link building article where everything is explained.

By the way, there’s one comment below the article that I want to quote here:

Melanie Nathan said:

“I suspect that most people will be too lazy to put in the work of doing the research and contacting each site though. That’s good. Their loss = our gain.”

I agree 100%.

I also keep in mind a short sentence from a very successful person (forgot who it was):

Do It Now.

Update: I followed my own advice and started emailing people when I found out another tip: once you identify the geocities page to which a site links, run a backlink report from Yahoo on that geocities page to find out other websites still linking to it.

I’ve been now actively involved with Internet marketing for 4 years and want to share my findings related to Pagerank – as I disagree that Pagerank is dead.

My findings are not based on a scientific study but on experience and I don’t claim that they are the unviversal truth about Pagerank. But there is some hard logic behind my ideas so I invite you to check them out.

Here’s why Pagerank is not dead yet:

Google says:

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

In plain English this means: Pages with higher Pagerank are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. This is especially important to note for those SEO geniuses who like to show examples of how their low pagerank page beats a higher pagerank page.

Yes, there are exceptions but the probability is NOT on your side. Google says »likely« and not »always«.

So what you’re doing with your example is showing the »unlikely« event and I definitely won’t base my link building strategies and success of my site on »unlikely« examples.

Feel free to follow the »unlikely« path though – a few less competitors for me in the long run.

And based on my experience and every day Googling on various topics, I almost always see high PR pages and website ranked higher than lower PR pages and websites.

Not always but “almost always”. Guess which path is the smarter one…

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.

Plain English: A link from a higher PR page will be more beneficial than a link from  a low PR page.

Therefore, I look to get links from high pagerank sites and pages as they are more beneficial. I will continue to do so until Google removes their claim and until I see no difference between high and low PR incoming links. Right now, I still see huge difference.

A PR5 link pointed to a site with lots of content (100 pages or so) and very few links, can quadruple the site’s traffic in a couple of months.

The Effect Of A PR5 Link - Very Few Pages Were Added From July To October

Why the exceptions? Why are sometimes low PR sites ranked higher than high PR sites?

From my experience, in order for Pagerank to really do its magic, it must be COMBINED with 3 other factors:

1.    Main keyword in the title – A low PR page can beat a higher PR page if the low PR page has the main keyword in the title and the high PR page doesn’t. If the high PR page added the main keyword in the title, it would most likely outrank the low PR page!

2.    Main keyword in the anchor text of incoming links – Similary, a low PR page can beat a higher PR page if the low PR page has the main keyword in the link text of the incoming links and the high PR page doesn’t. A high PR page has big advantage though; if it just gets a few anchor text links including the right link text (main keyword), it will very soon outrank the low PR page.

3.    Theme of the website – A low PR page can beat a higher PR page if the low PR page is on a website that is themed around tightly related keywords to the main keyword. Google says:

We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

Therefore if other pages of your site talk about similar topic, you’ll have better chances of ranking high.

This is where a high PR website cannot do much – except gain even more links to it to gain the »monster authority« status.

Typical examples of »monster authority« status in Google’s eyes are Wikipedia and Ezinearticles. They can outrank themed high PR sites even though their theme is spread among huge diversity of topics.

Note that in most cases (ALL from my experience), they have the main keyword in title and they have lots of internal links with that keyword in the link text!

So in order for Pagerank to work its magic, you need to:

-    Include the main keyword in the title
-    Include the main keyword in the link text of incoming links (external and internal!)
-    Build your site around a theme

If you do that, the probability of a lower PR page ranking higher than your page is microscopingly small.

So is Pagerank dead yet? Far from it:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.

You just need to know what part of the recipe for high rankings the PR  has. If you exclude Pagerank from the recipe, it’s very likely that your »cake won’t taste really sweet.«

1. Why did you decide on SBI?

I have always been attracted to being my own boss. After becoming interested in websites, I began reading all of the material that I could find about starting a profitable website. While I enjoyed working at the computer, I was not interested in learning all of the programming that I needed to create my own website.

Because of that, I wanted to join a program that did all of the technical stuff for me. At that point, the only program that I could find was $4,000! Yikes! That was much more than I could afford, and I began to feel a bit defeated.

Then, a friend of mine told me about SBI. I went to SBI’s site and did as much reading as I could. I discovered that SBI offered everything that I needed and wanted, and it was only $300 a year! It didn’t take long before I signed up.

2. Did you know what you wanted to write about, or did you have to find a niche? How did you decide?

I had a couple of ideas for what I wanted to write about, but I wasn’t sure which to pursue. After using SBI’s tools to research each market, I decided to pursue the topic of English grammar and sentence diagramming.

Between the tools that SBI has and the information that Tomaz gives, the research process was pretty clear-cut and easy. I have no idea how I would have found a viable topic without them.

3. How did you progress?

SBI is full of valuable, amazing information — all of which I have not mined yet. Between the Action Guide, the forums, and Tomaz’s information, I had everything I needed to know about making a successful website.

The best part was that the Action Guide took me step by step through the process. I would have been extremely overwhelmed without all of that instruction.

After having my site up for a few months, I started receiving messages and testimonials from people. That was quite delightful. At that moment, I really started to understand that through my website, I was connecting with and helping other people. That felt amazing.

I remember when I reached 100 visitors a day. I was so excited. Then, when my snowball started rolling, I went from 300 visitors a day to over 1,000 visitors a day within a few weeks!

4. Can you share a few tips of what really worked well for getting more traffic?

Building pages with good supply and demand numbers for the keywords and doing email interviews has worked really well for me. I got the idea to do email interviews from someone in the SBI forums. I use SBI’s Search It! function to find sites in similar niches, and then I find out their pagerank. I also spend a bit of time looking over the site and assessing the site’s quality.

If I like the site’s content, and it has a good pagerank, I’ll send an email to the site’s owner and ask them to do an email interview with me. So far, I haven’t had anyone turn me down!

Typically, the person will post a link to the interview on their site and maybe even a link to another of my pages. It’s a great way to build link popularity and interact with other people in my niche.

5. Your plans for the future? Has your life changed with your success? How? (or anything else you’d like to share!)

I plan on making a few more websites and making this type of work my main source of income.Going through this process has opened up a whole new lifestyle to me — one that I am very excited about. I LOVE being my own boss and planning my day around my goals.

Aside from just being my own boss, owning websites will allow my husband and me to travel. We both love exploring new places without the pressure of fitting our travels into a specific amount of time (like a two week vacation). With a website, we’ll be able to travel whenever we want.

And while my husband and I don’t have children yet, we are laying the foundation now so that when we do, we’ll be able to stay home with them.

“Freedom” is the perfect word to describe this way of life. Having a website and making money online without employees or an employer means that YOU have sole ownership of your time and your life. I can’t ask for anything more.

You can download my presentation here and here’s what I shared with each slide …

1.    Choosing a niche (Slide 2)
When you’re choosing a niche you need to assess whether there is enough demand for the keywords so that in the long term your site will get lots of traffic. My definition of lots of traffic is over 1000 daily visitors.

Based on my experience, you need at least 3000 total daily searches for top 100 keywords found through the free Wordtracker tool. If you go for too many, you may have too much competition so a good number to aim for is between 3000 and 8000 daily searches.

One of my sites is about vacuum cleaners and if you check the total demand in free WT, it shows just over 6000 daily searches which is perfect.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/?seed=vacuum+cleaner&suggest=Plugin&adult_filter=remove_offensive

But if for example you try water softener, you’ll see that the demand is just around 3000 which is not bad but I would still look to expand the niche.

http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/?seed=water+softener&adult_filter=remove_offensive&suggest=Hit+Me

There are 3 major ways of choosing keywords for your niche and you can check the SBI TNT article which explains that in more detail. (I wrote it by the way. )

2.    How to Brainstorm (Slide 3)
So if we want to expand the water softener niche, we need to find related keywords. The best way to do that is to use the Google Adwords tool, check the »Use Synonyms« box and click on »Get keyword ideas«.

The first section of keywords will contain only keywords which include water softener seed word. But if you scroll down, you’ll find »Additional keywords to consider« which you can also sort by Relevance. They usually are sorted by relevance by default.

So Google clearly suggests which keywords are tightly related to your main keyword and now you can brainstorm them too and get many more keywords in demand.

(Slide 4)
Once you have these keywords, you need to do a vertical brainstorm on them (example: vertical brainstorm on water conditioner) but then you need to delete low demand keywords from your MKL (Master Keyword List) because it allows you to store only 1000 keywords.

So you need to do a vertical brainstorm for each seed word, then delete low demand keywords (for example with less than 200 Value demand) and then do another vertical brainstorm on another seed word and so on.

Once you get all the keywords, organize them into T2 and T3 pages.

(Slide 5)
For T2 pages, choose keywords with at least 1000 Value demand and possibly less than 1000 Real supply. For T3 pages use keywords with at least 500 demand (go lower if you run out of keywords but don’t go below 200 or 150) and less than 500 supply. (lower is even better)

T2 keywords are typically 2 or 3 word keywords and T3 keywords are typically 3 or 4 or 5 word keywords…

3.    Finding even more keywords (Slide 6)
The best way to find more keywords besides the ones you get from the SBI Brainstormer is to use the Google Adwords tool again.

(Slide 7) If for example you search for more keywords based on hepa vacuum keyword, you’ll get only a few suggestions from the Wordtracker or SBI BI (SBI uses Wordtracker as its main database).

(Slide 8 ) But if you look for more keyword ideas based on hepa vacuum in Google Adwords tool, you’ll see that Google gives you back many more keywords.

While they don’t have that much demand, it’s still enough (Choose Exact Match and you’ll see how many times the keywords have been searched in one month). Divide by 30 to get daily searches.)

You may also discover high paying keywords for which you then optimize your articles and get higher paying clicks on your Adsense units.

4.    Optimizing for best rankings (Slide 9)
How to optimize your homepage has been already explained in the post about Understanding Site Concept, Tier 1…

(Slide 10)
You can also optimize your T2 and T3 pages for more than one keyword. The best way to do that is to look for long tail words of your keyword and include them in the title and a few times in the article.

If for example you start typing tennis instruction in Google, you’ll see that Google suggests long tail keywords.

You then need to find a way to include a few of those in the title. So Google suggests online, video, drills, for kids, videos free and other words and I’ve included a few of them in my title which says Tennis Instruction – Videos, Tips and Free Online Tennis Lessons.

You can now try searching for all those keyword combinations (like tennis instruction videos and tennis instruction online etc.) and see where my page ranks. You’ll also see that Google »boldens« those words which means that they are part of the ranking algorithm.

Sometimes you’ll come across different words like water cooler and water dispenser which mean exactly the same. Use both of them in the title and basically optimize the article for both.

See how I’ve done that on the office water coolers article on my water site.

5.    Internal linking (Slide 11)
Internal linking is so important that I’ve decided to include it in my presentation. It’s one of the secrets of high rankings.

The key is to use your keywords in the link text of your links. You need to link back from every T2 page to your homepage saying »Back from T2 keyword to homepage keyword«.

You can see how I did that on the Miele vacuum cleaners page. Scroll to the bottom and you’ll see a link back to the homepage using the right link text.

You also need to link back from every T3 page to the parent T2 page and also to the homepage using the right keywords.

The link text “TELLS” Google for which keywords it should rank your page – so it’s crucial that you use it correctly in your external and internal links!

Of course, since you optimized your homepage for 3 or more keywords (and also your T2), vary the link text pointing to the homepage and T2 pages. I sometimes link to the homepage with link text vacuum cleaner reviews, sometimes with best vacuum cleaners and sometimes just with vacuum cleaners.

(Slide 12)
I also suggest that you internally link between your T3 pages – of course using the right keywords in the link text.

When you add a new page to your site, try to include 2 or 3 links to your existing pages. But you can also search your existing pages for the keyword which your new article is optimized for and change those words into links.

For example: if I were to write an article about sports psychology (main keyword), I could search like this in Google: “sports psychology” site:www.tennismindgame.com and Google would show me all pages where this keyword has already been used.

Now I could just edit those pages and change a few keywords into links. If you have a blog, do the same search on your blog and you can quickly find a few links that perfectly fit your content – the words were already there.

To see an example of internal linking done to the max, see how most Wikipedia pages look like. And you know that Wikipedia ranks extremely high in Google for thousands of keywords – so they must be doing something right, right?

6.    Recipe for Lots of Traffic (Slide 13)
Choose high demand / low supply keywords (ideal – Value demand over 1000, supply less than 500), build your site to over 100 pages (over 200 even better), properly interlink them like suggested above and get lots of links from different domains using the right anchor text.

If you want to increase your traffic to the level of top SBI sites, you must have the similar amount and quality of pages and links. And these sites get over 4000 incoming links from 200 different domains on average.

Content + links = traffic

If you follow these steps, you’ll reach the final goal – becoming free! It won’t happen in 3 months, but you’ll be well on your way after just 1 year.

(These are my Chitika earnings so far. Have you started using Chitika yet? )

I’ve also seen my articles from my »static« SBI sites being indexed very quickly – in a matter of minutes too.

But since most static websites focus mostly on keywords that get searched over and over again, blogs can focus on keywords that happen »now«.

Getting a blog post quickly up when something interesting happens is crucial to get lost of traffic. Realize that this traffic will typically NOT monetize well since people are just curios and are not in the buying mode.

But still, they might subscribe to your newsletter, the RSS feed or even bookmark your site for later.

I wanted to show you an example of how much traffic you can get if you quickly write a blog post when something happens.
Serena Williams just lost her semi-final match against Kim Clijsters and she lost it in a very controversial way.

Since I watched the match live on TV, I quickly wrote a blog post about Serena Williams’ foot fault and what my thoughts were.

The traffic immediately shot up and I literally had to sit behind my PC and approve comments every few minutes because they were just flowing in.

One more thing: when I noticed that I get lots of traffic for Serena Williams foot fault keyword, I then decided to quickly write this post so that I could get a text link to my blog with that exact keyword and hopefully push it up a few more places higher.

In such cases, timing is everything.

Update – 2 days later:

The traffic to my blog was incredible; over 18,000 visitors in one single day and the article was not on Digg.

It was almost all through Google as you can see from the keywords below:

Again, the key to such traffic was writing a post on an event that just occurred and of course using the right keywords. Some of it was luck and the rest happened with tons of comments flowing in.

Did this extra traffic result in more earnings? Yes, some of the people coming in also found my site for the first time and I made a few extra sales of my tennis ebooks and videos:

Anyway, very interesting to see all these stats and also good advice for those focusing more on blogging and not so much for creating big websites focused on keywords that get searched over and over again.

I visit the SBI forums daily and every day there is someone asking for a site review and complaining about low traffic.

And EVERY time I check their sites, I see the same thing; almost 0 incoming links or having some links but they’re coming from low quality sites.

Somehow, somewhere the most important information on how to get lots of free search engine traffic got lost.

So here it is: In order to rank high for a certain keyword in search engines like Google, Yahoo and Live, your keyword most have good demand, not too much competition and LINKS pointing to it.

Ideally, the link’s anchor text includes your keyword or a slight variation of it. These links should come from quality websites (and pages!) where the quality can be determined by high pagerank and high Alexa rating.

This is it. This is the most important information about getting free traffic. EVERYTHING else is less important.

How many links do good sites have?

Have you ever asked yourself this question?

Because if links are so important, then getting close to your competitors (or partners) in search ranking results will depend on whether you can get approximately the same amount and quality of links.

I’ve hired a freelancer to do analysis of backlinks of 110 websites which will enable you to compare your site’s backlinks to their count and see WHY you still struggle.

Trust me, it’s not the design of your site (Google doesn’t care how your site looks like) and it’s not the publishing platform (Google doesn’t care whether you use SBI, Wordpress or simply upload static HTML to a server).

In 99% of the cases, you’re lacking links.

Sure, you need content and hopefully you’re choosing most of the winnable keywords and hopefully you aim for at least a 100 page website. All that is necessary but I rarely see the number of pages as the key problem to low traffic.

It’s the links that are missing.

The analysis was done on the top 10 websites in each category of the SBI Results page. There are 11 categories and I’ve chosen top 10 websites in each and done a link analysis on them.

The backlink analysis consists of two numbers:

1.    The total number of incoming links reported by Yahoo. The number represents only external links and to the entire site. (so not only to the homepage)

2.    The number of domains (different websites) linking to your site. The number of different domains seems to be one of the most important factors determining the overall trust of your website in Google’s results. You can get of course 100 incoming links if a blog with 100 pages puts your link in their blogroll. That will of course give you much weaker results than for example getting 1 link from 100 dfifferent websites.

You’ll also see Alexa rating of each website.

Here’s a shortcut if you don’t want to check the whole analysis:
-    The average incoming link count of top 10 websites in 11 categories is around 4000 incoming links.
-    And the average number of different websites linking to a top 10 website in these 11 categories is over 220.

If you’re not anywhere close to these numbers, you WILL NOT get lots of traffic. This is what’s needed to make your site stand of from the crowd of crappy sites and get tons of free search engine traffic.

You can download the full backlink report here (Right click and choose Save Link As or Save Target As… – it’s an .xls file for Microsft Excel).

How to analyze links

You can get the total number of incoming links by typing link:www.domain.com in Yahoo.com and then selecting »Except from this domain« and »to: Entire Site«.

To get the number od domains linking to your site, use SEOmoz Linkscape and then look at the »Root domains linking to the page« number.

So in order to get lots of traffic (as those sites do clearly do), you need to have similar factors. These factors include the number of pages and the number and quality of incoming links.

If you’re still struggling with traffic and you have more than 100 pages (without lots of pages, the links cannot do their magic!), then start working on links, links, links!!!

P.S. And where can I get links? In the same places as the other sites in your niche did!

Yahoo shows you almost every site and almost every page from where the other site gets links. Check those pages and see if you can get a link there too!

While I haven’t been using them for that long, I’ve decided to share my Copaclick review here because the company is constantly improving their system.

The one thing that Copaclick are proud of is their quick adaptation to the publisher feedback.

Therefore, I’ll cover here what they offer at the moment (September 2009), but I suggest that if you read this Copaclick review later, head over to their site to see what’s new.

Choosing Your Ad’s Appearance

You can select typical sizes for your ads like 300×250, 160×600, 468×180 and others. There are currently  7 color themes to choose from but I am sure that you’ll be able to choose many more soon.

One interesting feature that comes with Copaclick ads is the Highlight section which enables you to highlight the title of the ad.

This may be especially useful for the ads in the side column (160×600) where the highlight may help draw visitor’s attention to the ad. I am still testing this and I’ll let you know soon how it goes.

Choosing Ad’s Content

Copaclick ads are based on products so you can choose your preferred keyword for the ad (if I’m using the ad on a page about Hoover vacuums, I can select Hoover vacuum cleaner) but there’s also the Fallback Category (where I’d choose Vacuums) in case there’s no directly targeted ad for my page.

There are tons of Fallback categories, from used cars to hard drives and home appliances. If you have a product related website, I am sure you’ll find your category in there…

Optional Search Targetted Setting

Copaclick allows you to select search targetting which will use the referring search engine’s keywords (if there are any) instead of the keywords you set in the previous step.

Once you complete that step, you’ll be given a javascript code which you can then add to your pages.

Similar Products (Beta)

There’s also the Similar Products ad which shows more products all related to the keyword or the Fallback Category you selected.

Results So Far…

The Copaclick payout per click is currently at around the same amount as I get with Chitika on my sites. There are three reasons why I am still using Copaclick though:

• Not all visitors like the same ads. Some visitors prefer Adsense while others ads with images like Chitika and Copaclick. That’s why I use different types of ads on my pages to reach a wider audience.
• In some places, I use Copaclick as an alternate ad to Chitika. I use Chitika Premium which displays to search engine traffic and Copaclick which displays to the rest of the traffic. This adds additional revenue (I am at around 4-5 extra dollars per day) which I wouldn’t get with Chitika which wouldn’t show to non-search engine traffic.
• I’m waiting (testing) to see which ad network performs best in the long term and I’ll use it in the most prominent places.

One thing I really like about Copaclick ads is their clean look. They don’t like like annoying ads and blend very nicely and non-aggressively into a page.

If you have a product based website or even pages where products are mentioned, try the pay-per-click Copaclick network. (aff link)

They currently pay to Paypal if you accumulate more than $25 in one month which is also very convenient.

If you’ve tried Copaclick and wish to share your results or if you have any more questions, just use the comment section below!

1. Why did you decide for Site Build It?

In 2006 I was on maternity leave with two young children at home and  desperately wanted to find a way to stay at home but still have an income.  In the past I have tried mlm opportunities, been a catalogue distributor,  and sold on ebay.

None of these were able to provide me with the income that  I needed so I looked to my previous experience as an Event Manager and set  up my own event business. 

I organised a Parent and Child Expo in my home town, sold the exhibition  stands, tickets and promoted the event on my own. It was successful but it  was really hard to do with children at home, I was running round the house  trying to find a quiet space when prospects called me back. Looking back it  was a crazy thing to do.

After the event I realised that I needed something that I could work at in  ‘not real time’ in otherwords work while my children are asleep and the  internet seemed the perfect opportunity.

Problem was I knew nothing about  how to make money online so I started to research opportunities and luckily  for me decided SBI was right for me. That was after reading loads of stories  on how others are successful with SBI.

Plus they offered a money back  guarantee, so what did I have to loose?

2. Did you know what you wanted to write about or did you have to find a niche?

I didn’t have a clue about what to write about, I thought it would have  something to do with event management but that was as far as it went.

How did you decide?

I used the brainstorm it tool to find a niche that was profitable and when I looked at weddings, at the time the term cheap wedding gown had a great demand and not a great supply. Fantastic! And I do love a good wedding!

3. How did you progress?

I followed the action guide fairly well, I have a terrible habit of getting excited and going off on my own merry way, so I have to keep referring back to see what I missed first time round.

The beauty of SBI is that it carrys on working for you even if you miss a few steps – thank goodness!

My cheap wedding site is now nearly 3 years old and has around 2000 visits a  day – not bad for a mum at home, working in the evenings.

The best bit is  that it provides me with an income to be at home with my children, I can  pick my son up from school and spend lots of time with my daughter. Today we  were at the park and picking blackberries – not many berries made it home!

4. Can you share a few tips of what really worked well for getting more traffic?

Writing keyword focused pages for my website has helped me with my search  engine rankings which brings a lot of traffic, writing articles and having  them on lots of wedding sites, and interviews with industry professionals  has been great as they add their expertise and often link back to my site.

Plus my free wedding stuff ezine and monthly wedding contests have brides  coming back for more.

5. Your plans for the future? (or anything else you’d like to share!)

Keep building cheap wedding solutions, help my husband with his anniversary gifts by year site (it didn’t take him long to want his own site) and add more SBI sites when I have more time.

My daughter starts school next year so I will have more time.  Our long term goal is to have both of us working from home on our websites  which would be a dream come true.

There’s content building, creating a blog, RSS, newsletter, link building, social bookmarking, tweeting and much more.

The key question (often missed) is NOT: ”What is everything that I need to do in order to build a successful website?”

BUT “Which action / task will give me the best result?”

You need to prioritize among all the possible actions mentioned above in order to make the best of your time – especially if you’re still in a full time job and even have children which definitely take a lot of time.

Imagine having just one page – the homepage. Which action will give you the best result (most benefit)?

Creating a newsletter module, RSS, link building or adding more pages?

Adding more pages of course. Your first goal is to create traffic which you can later monetize. And you create the foundation for traffic with lots of content pages.

I typically build most of T2 pages (menu pages) and add 3 to 5 articles under EACH of them. If I have 10 T2 pages and add 4 T3 pages under each of them, that amounts to 10 + 40 = 50 pages.

Around this time, the answer to the key question: “Which action will give me the best result / most benefit?” changes; it’s BUILDING LINKS.

A simple example: if I have 50 pages and add the 51st, I will get less traffic increase than if I acquire 1 quality link to my website. I am of course assuming that no links have been built so far.

A website with 0 incoming links will receive VERY little traffic even if it has 500 perfectly optimized pages.

A website with 30 poorly optimized pages and 500 quality links WILL receive MUCH more traffic.

So at around 50 pages or so, your most important action becomes link building. You should of course build more pages too but they can be your priority #2.

I’d work on link building and adding content until I’d have more than 100 daily visitors and then I’d start working on some other modules like newsletter, RSS, C2 and so on.

These should still follow the link building and adding pages, except that you can devote maybe 10% or 20% of your time to those extra tasks instead of using 100% of your time looking for links and writing pages.

When you start getting 150 or 200 daily visitors, you’ll probably want to earn some money.

At that time, the answer changes again; the action that will give you most benefit (which now changes from getting more traffic to earning more money!) is optimizing your monetization model(s).

Adding Adsense or Chitika or both at the right places, adding affiliate links and so on will give you the most benefit right now.

Once you monetize, your goal is now a combination of getting more traffic and consequently earning more.

(If you want to build your list, then this is another goal that might be the most important benefit at some point!)

If you just monetized with Adsense or Chitika above the fold and possibly once or twice below the fold, you can simply add more pages (with ads) and you’ll get more traffic and more earnings.

At some point, probably after one year or even more, you’ll start ranking for more competitive keywords and you’ll also have lots of links that will help you site rank well.

From here on, it’s tough to make a general statement of what action will give you the most benefit but you’ll have enough experience by now that you’ll know the answer.

Because the problem doesn’t lie in not knowing the answer, it lies in NOT asking the right question.

So again, while you’re building your online business, ask yourself the key question here and there: ”What action / task will give me the most benefit / best result?”

It will help you narrow down all the zillion choices you have when it comes to home based online business and make the most progress in the shortest amount of time.

One way is to keep track of all link exchanges in an Excel file where you’d note the exact page from which the other site links back.

If you are that disciplined to do that for every link exchange across all your sites, then skip this post.

If on the other hand you’re a little bit lazy or you completely forgot to record pages with reciprocal links, then here are two simple ways of checking whether the partner site links back:

1.    Bing LinkFromDomain command

Even MSN.com had the command before but you’ll probably use Bing.com now. Type LinkFromDomain:domain.com and Bing will list all OUTGOING links from that domain.

In case you want to check if another website links to you, add your domain name to the search query like this:

LinkFromDomain:domain.com yourdomain

So, if I want to check whether Chitika.com links to this blog, I would enter:

LinkFromDomain:chitika.com freedomideas.com

There are two results which confirm that Chitika links to my blog BUT it doesn’t tell me FROM which pages on Chitika.com.

2.    Google site command

The Google site command doesn’t actually check for a link, but it looks for a keyword on the website. So I might search like this:

freedomideas site:chitika.com

Try this search in Google and you’ll see more results – but some of those are not actual links, they just contain the keyword freedomideas.

The main advantage of this search is that I can visit the page and see the pagerank of that page for example.

There are some reciprocal link checking tools online, but they all require that you input the exact URL of the page which you then check for a link to your site.

If you want to find them, just Google »check reciprocal links«…

If you have any other ways of checking reciprocal / outgoing links, please share them!