The key to this strategy is RSS. It's a crucial tool for utilising Web 2.0 sites because it acts as a connector between your blog, your Squidoo lens, your Twitter feed and all the other Web 2.0 sites you use — ultimately helping you to form a tight network, which in turn, leads to piles of traffic.
What is RSS? A refresher:
RSS is a type of language that formats your website content in a standard way so that a variety of RSS readers can understand it and display it to subscribers.When you go to a blog or any number of other sites you'll often see an orange block in the address bar, or somewhere else on the page. That's the RSS icon. If you click on this it will bring up the RSS feed.
How is an RSS feed useful?
Many web 2.0 sites allow you to- create RSS feeds
- add content to their networks using RSS feeds.
Not only that, each update will also provide a link back to the original source for the RSS feed. What that means is that you can build a chain or network of sites and links that ends up pointing back to your main website — and thereby explode your traffic through the backlinks!
The way to put this into practice is to take a systematic approach. Here's the basic method:
- Create three or four 300 word articles that are on the keyword topic you want to rank for. Make sure these articles have compelling titles which include the main keyword. Also make sure the keywords are in the opening and closing paragraph and once or twice throughout the body text. The content needs to have a purpose and direct readers to take action.
- Create a high quality lens on Squidoo and post one of your articles along with a text link back to your main site that uses the keyword you'd like to rank for.
- Go to Twitter and make a post that says something like: "I just created a new lens at...(and insert your Squidoo lens URL)". This is to get your backlink spidered.
- Create a page at Hubpages.com.
Hubpages describes itself as the leading online publishing ecosystem and is in fact very similar to Squidoo. The benefit of Hubpages however, is that it gives you more tools to monetize your page and doesn't require the same amount of profit sharing as Squidoo.
For this fourth step of the process, add your second article to your Hub, again making sure to include a keyword text link back to your main site. You should also add the RSS feed from your Squidoo lens to your Hubpage. - Go back to Twitter and make a post about your new Hubpage to get that backlink spidered.
- Create a blog at Blogger.com and add the third article with a text link containing your keyword back to your main site and add the RSS feed from the Squidoo and Hubpages page to your blog.
- Post on Twitter about that to get your Blogger post spidered.
- Create a page at Tumblr.com and add the RSS feed from your new pages (Tumblr allows you to add up to 5 pages).
- Post on Twitter again to get that backlink spidered.
- Create a page at FeedBite.com with the RSS feed from all the previous sites.
- Post on Twitter.
- Create an account at Bumpzee and add your Squidoo, HubPages, Blogger and Tumblr RSS feed.
- Go to Ping.in and ping all the pages you've just created, including your Twitter page.
- And on and on you go....!
I could continue, but I'm sure you are getting the general idea!
Mix it up
Don't take the example I've just given as a rigid formula to be followed to the letter. The beauty of this method is that it can be mixed up in a thousand different ways; the more original the better.Some Web 2.0 sites to try are:
- Hubpages
- Squidoo
- Tumblr
- Blogger
- Xanga
- Yahoo360
- Wordpress.com (although they're VERY wary of anything that looks commercial)
- Zimbio
- FeedBite
- Bumpzee
- Ezinearticles
- Twitter (for getting your new sites, posts, comments etc indexed in Google)
- Ping.in (for pinging your new content)
Which Web 2.0 sites work best?
This is a common question, but the answer is simply that it doesn't really matter. The sites that work for you might be different from the sites that work for other affiliate marketers; so don't get too hung up on this issue. The best idea is to watch your web statistics and see which web 2.0 sites are sending you the most traffic. From that information, you can weed out the ones that aren't working and focus on the ones that are.Most web hosting companies will give you a basic stats package that allows you to see where your traffic is coming from.
Forget the "nofollow" tag
The nofollow tag is what some sites add to their outgoing links to tell the search engines not to pay attention to that link. It was introduced a few years back to try to curb comment spam in blogs. It's considered a problem for internet marketers because a backlink with a "nofollow" tag doesn't really count as a backlink - it stops PageRank being passed on by the search engines, making the "backlink" useless for SEOHowever, the good news is that even with the nofollow tag, people will still visit a website, read your content and then visit your site. And at the end of the day, isn't traffic what you're really after anyway?
