Every successful website has hundreds (if not thousands) of backlinks from quality partners that allow them to achieve a higher overall rating in the grand scheme of things. Choosing websites to affiliate yourself with may seem easy at first, but the truth of the matter is that high quality backlinks can sometimes be hard to come by if you do not know where to look. This article will give you a little bit of direction on how to find solid, beneficial backlinks plus explain the ones to avoid when building a website geared towards affiliate marketing.
Finding Businesses with Similar Interests
Many website builders will make the tragic mistake of emailing every domain they find that has a similar interest to theirs and asking for a backlink exchange. While this is a great idea in principle, it is important to remember that your ultimate goal is to always partner yourself with businesses that takes the time to do things the right way. Websites that are solely geared towards backlink building can often hurt you in the long run; it’s a much better idea to seek quality businesses. The online gambling industry, for example, has thousands of affiliate websites out there in cyberspace and many of them are as different as night and day. On one of them you may find thousands of strategy articles and other content designed to educate consumers,while the next one you visit is simply plastered with banners and nothing else of value. That first website we mentioned would drastically improve your overall rank if you exchanged backlinks; the second would likely drop your visibility even lower.
Article Directories
Article directories like eHow, Ezine, and Squidoo give you a quality backlink inexchange for submitting an article to their database, but it is still nowhere near as valuable as receiving a few unique links from quality partners. Many website builders will make the mistake of trying to build their brand through article directories alone and some of them are successful; but at quite a high cost. It may take dozens of backlinks from Suite101, for example, to equal one backlink from the Washington Post or another top website presence. Now, we’re not saying that article directories are a bad thing, but they should only be a small percentage of your total backlinks instead of being the whole pie. Take the carpet cleaning business, for example, and the number of competitors in any given market that create a small website to promote their services. In larger cities, the carpet cleaning business that ranks first on the list is the guy that is mentioned on other local websites like the area newspaper, radio stations, and other businesses.
Quality Always Beats Quantity
It’s easy to think that throwing your name out there in every possible location could only help your affiliate marketing campaigns, but more often than not this type of plan backfires. Five to ten quality backlinks will more than likely beat out the guy who has hundreds of generic references throughout cyberspace, simply because Google and the other search engines hold serious respect for successful websites that have taken the time to build a large presence for their customers. If you want your website to be one of those enlightened few that rakes in thousands of dollars in ad revenue per day, always pick quality over quantity in every aspect. It maybe harder and take a lot more of your time, but the results will speak for themselves.