Trying To Make Money Blogging

All I can think of lately is stats. Not traffic, but the number of backlinks I have. Backlinks are of course very important area for your blog. Firstly they bring visitors to your blog. And secondly, increasing the amount of backlinks you have, will get your site listed higher in search engines. This is very important because better search engine results = more visitors.

After a check up of my sites backlinks, I was very disappointed at the number I had. The reason for my low backlink count was of course my own fault. Backlinks don’t automatically come to you, you have to put in the time and the effort in order to get them. A lot Of time and effort is again needed if you want to get backlinks with sites that have a good PageRank. There are lots ways to get backlinks, some are good some are not so good. One method that was a complete waste of time for me was submitting to lots and lots of directories. Even though my blog has been accepted and published in lots of directories, Google isn’t counting my backlinks.

If directories still interest you, probably the best directory to try and get listed in is DMOZ. The big problem with DMOZ though, is that it’s very hard to actually get accepted. DMOZ is run by volunteers, they decide what sites get listed at DMOZ. They’re very picky with whom they select. I get the impression they wont accept your blog/website if they feel it’s some kind of threat to their interests. If you still really like the idea of directories? I would suggest possibly using paid directories. But as I’ve never paid to have my blog listed in a directory, there isn’t any advice I can offer you in that area. So do some research and ask around before paying out your hard earned money.

Actually I forgot to mention the Yahoo directory. Getting listed at http://dir.yahoo.com/ will cost you $299. For me and for many others out there, $299 is way over budget. You can however get listed at http://ca.dir.yahoo.com (Canadian Yahoo) for free. Simply Navigate to the category best suited for your blog and away you go. I submitted my blog about 1 month ago and I’m still waiting to find out if I got in or not. You’re going to need patience for this one.

Another method I’ve been using which is probably the simplest, is to find blogs similar to mine and ask the owners for a link exchange. Some blog owners are really tight fisted and will only except money. But I’ve found a few blog owners who were more than happy to do a straight swap.

Probably the most effective way I’ve found though is a bit of a dirty tactic. There are various websites and tools out there, that let you see how many backlinks somebody else’s blog has. You can find out which sites are giving them backlinks too. What I usually do is find a blog that has a little more traffic than my blog has. I’ll then run a check on that blog and go and visit the sites which are linking to them. The tool I use tells me if the link is an actual backlink or a nofollow. It also gives me the PageRank, alexa rank and keywords used.

To be honest, I’ve found what I’m doing at the moment to be pretty successful. I’m happy about this because working on getting backlinks is something I’ve never tried before. I’ve also met some nice blog authors over the last few days, and I’ve discovered some great blogs in categories I wouldn’t normally be interested in.

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