For my last post, I explained the importance of creating an RSS feed for your site. This step is hugely important. In order to keep track of the people that are subscribing to your feed, you will need to ‘burn’ your feed.
Feedburner.com is a site that helps you to keep track of all the people that have subscribed to your site. ‘Burning’ your feed simply means you allow Feedburner to keep track of your subscriptions for you. When a person subscribes to your feed, they will first be taken to the Feedburner site, where they will be able to choose which reader they want to use.
Feedburner is 100% free to use and allows you to keep track of your feed count, which is the number of readers that are subscribed to your feed. This helps you to get links, because it can help you to get more subscriptions. Once you have a few hundred subscribers to your RSS feed, others will jump on the bandwagon.
Many of your readers will want to follow you through an RSS feed. This makes it a lot easier for them to follow the sites they like. An RSS feed is a news feed, and users are able to combine all their feeds into one central location. That way they don’t have to waste time going to all the different sites they want to read. They open up their feed reeder and find all the content they have subscribed to.
At first thought you may be thinking that you don’t want to publish an RSS feed because you want your readers to come to your site. I thought the same thing in the beginning. However, many web-savvy individuals read all of their online content via RSS. If you don’t publish a feed, you will never attract that type of reader, which happens to be the type of reader that will link to you the most.
People that read using RSS are using very savvy technically, which makes them a lot more likely to have a site of their own. Readers that have their own sites are the only ones that link to you, so it’s definitely worth publishing an RSS feed. An easy way to offer a feed is by adding a blog to your site. WordPress create an RSS feed automatically, and I would recommend using them as your blog software anyway. They are by far the best out there.
Gaining the respect and trust of your field’s gurus can result in some of the most powerful links you will ever get. A link from one of them could be as valuable as 100 or even 1,000 links from sites that don’t have as much authority.
The easiest way to get an A-list blogger’s attention is to link to them. Almost all of the top blogs use WordPress, which allows the blogger to easily see when a new site has created a link to their blog. That way they will notice your post. Use an interesting title for the post, and you’re well on your way to getting a link from an A-lister.
To maximize the effectiveness of this link building tip, I would recommend holding off until you have at least a semi-established site. If you try this technique with your first post it probably won’t work at all. That will be the case with many of my link building techniques - they will probably be a lot more effective after you have a site that has some valuable material there.
Submitting your best work to Digg can be one of the most effective link building techniques around. Digg is basically a news/content site that is controlled by its users. The ‘Diggers’ vote on each article and news story that is submitted. Stories that receive a lot of positive votes will gain more and more exposure until they hit the Digg.com homepage.
Articles that hit the front page of Digg will easily pull in between 5000-10000 hits in a 12 hour period. Since the post/article/story has so much exposure, it will be linked to like crazy.
Creating an article that hits the front page of Digg requires thinking outside the box. You will have to create an original story or idea that hasn’t been rehashed a million times. Diggers crave new material incessantly and if you can satisfy that craving you’ll be well on your way to building massive amounts of links.
There are multiple search engine benefits that come from posting well and posting often. Instead of talking about all the different benefits that can come from posting a lot, I’m strictly going to cover the link building benefits of posting often.
When readers of your site know that you will be posting often, they will be checking often. Great content will naturally generate links, but if no one reads the content it won’t do anything for you. Simple reasoning tells you that you must post often to maintain a readership - why would a first time visitor turn into a regular if they have to wait for months between posts?
Posting often gives your readers more material to get excited about. Some of your readers will love one post, others will love different posts. The major point here, however, is that you have to have plenty of material for them to choose from - that’s when the natural links will start to flow.
