We all get link requests, most of them are automated garbage & some are legitimate. Some are also too good to be true.

If it’s the latter then I advise you to look a bit closer at what is being offered as recently I came across a interesting Recropical Link Cloaking tactic.

Don’t think this is a new tactic either, this has been going on for a very very long time.

Setting the Scene

You get an email similar to this one:

Hello,

As I was surfing around Google , I discovered your website: http://www.earnersblog.com/ I am trying to add as many informative websites as possible to my site. Which in turn will benefit my users as well as provide you with relevant traffic to your site. I have a website with about 5,000 – 7,000 people on it per day who fit the same demographic as your site.

If you follow this link, http://www.widgets.com/?pg=2eC4L you will see that I put your link on my homepage.

Some website owners do not like when other sites link to them so I thought I might ask for your review.

Please get back to me when you have a chance, to let me know if the link I have placed suits your needs.
Also if you would like a custom Title for it just send me a email and I will get it updated.

Have a good week

Read More…

If you’re on there, add me here

Follow thousands of people

Pretty straight forward, just follow as many people as you can. If you’re interesting enough a certain percentage will follow you back, I’ve noticed a 10% ratio here, a bit higher if you’re a ‘beautiful woman’ *coughs*

Tweet famous people

There’s a lot of famous people on twitter now with A LOT of followers. If you can somehow get them to tweet back at you then you’ve got a lot of potential traffic hitting your twitter profile. Creativity is the key here. Read More…

Came across this today & had to share it. Major shopping retailer here in Australia.

Someone introduce them to Google Webmaster Tools please?

Hey guys, I’ve scoped out a new project & I’m looking to partner with a Designer/Developer to take things to the next level. My aim is create a team that is building a constant stream of affiliate sites that provide a useful purpose for people & share the profits.

The kind of person I’m looking to partner with:

1. Experience in building web applications with a focus on user experience
2. At least 2 years experience with Ruby/Python
3. XHTML & CSS is a must
4. JQuery knowledge
5. Data mining & Mysql
6. Experience in designing user interfaces

So if you’re keen to potentially get involved get in touch. Please note, this will not be a full time paid position it’ll involve equity in the business.

How to apply

Rather than taking your word for how good you are I’d like to put forward a quick test, I want you to create a quick skeleton site that performs the following:

1. Has a search box that allows a user to type in a url (i.e. www.earnersblog.com)
2. When a user hits submit I want you to create a page around the URL in the format (http://www.yoursite.com/www.earnersblog.com)
3. On that page I want you to pull a screenshot of my site, the meta description & show the last 5 posts below (not by parsing RSS).
4. If you can style this & make it look pretty then that’ll earn brownie points also
5. Once complete drop me a mail at stuart [at] earnersblog.com or leave a comment in this post.
6. I’ll test the system with another URL to check it works.

If you can do the above in another language other than Ruby/Python give it a shot I’ll not rule out other coding languages.

Cheers guys & good luck!

Welcome to the one stop shop for link builders looking to utilise social networks & other forms of dofollow link building techniques. I aim to keep this list as an up do date resource that grows over time, so please don’t hesitate to let me know if:

1. There’s sites/resources I’m missing
2. One of the sites I have listed goes nofollow

Current Total: 95 Sites

Social Submission & Voting Sites

These sites are the bread & butter of social bookmarking. The idea is to submit your site/posts & let the community vote. Not only do you get the initial link from the social site, really sticky content has the ability to go viral & generate a much larger range of links from relevant blogs / forums & websites. Remember, submit your best content. Read More…

You’ve probably seen me harp on about the power of Aweber before, I use it to build lists for every campaign I run & also on almost every affiliate product based website I have.

I’m going to share with you a small secret that will help you triple your profits on landing pages in three different ways. This technique works best with product reviews, but I’m sure you’ll find a way to make it work with your niche.

Capturing Data

This technique works by capturing the customers data before you send them on to the purchase/presell page of the product that you’re reviewing. By far the easiest way to do this is to offer them a bonus download (worth $50 – $100) that is related to the product in question.

Here’s a brief example I found that uses this technique with Ebooks:

Read More…

We’re currently working on the beta version of our Affiliate Network Reviews & as such I’m currently signing up to every network out there to really get an idea of how they operate.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to outlay some of the key things you should do before applying to a network:

What you’ll need

1. Name
2. Email
3. Other contact details (Daytime & Evening Phone)
4. Current Address
5. Business Name
6. Payment details (Paypal or DD)
7. Tax Information / SS (Unless outside USA)
8. Website details including UB’s & niche
9. How you intend to send traffic (i.e. Email, PPC or SEO)
10. If Email you may be asked for the IP address of your mail server
11. Other affiliate networks you’re working with

Read More…

As part of your affiliate link building strategy forums should not be overlooked. They are endless sources of linky goodness waiting to be tapped into.

Why? Well for starters you have the ability to control a large number of factors:

1. The theme of the page you’re getting the links from
2. The number of links you’re attaining
3. The speed at which the links are acquired
4. The anchor text & associated page for the link (i.e. deep pages)

You also have an almost infinite inventory out there (1.8 billion results). Read More…