There’s a popular misconception that blogs (all blogs) do not allow comments, and they are so heavily moderated that you would never see one of your comments go live with a backlink intact. This is untrue, and you will find that it is the biggest blogs on the web that will give you the most link juice, and who actually encourage posting on their sites. This is all part and parcel of the internet revolution that is Web 2.0, where sites strive to become more collaborative with their readership.

When you are looking for blogs to post on, you will most probably be doing it wrong. You will be looking for blogs in your niche, which are relevant to your site. This way, a comment that you post on the blog will be relevant, and of course moderated accordingly. This is, to some extent, exactly what you should be doing. You post a comment, and your name becomes an anchor text. That anchor can point at your niche site. However, the way to REALLY do this properly, is to look for blogs that have Top Commentators. Well the main reason is that your anchor text will appear on every page of the blog –as well as the front page. You will get the link juice of whatever Pagerank the site is, and also even get traffic from people clicking your name/link – because you are a top commentator.

The way to find these sites is also very simple indeed. Simply go to Google, and search for the following:

allintext: “Top Commentators” “Powered by WordPress “

And that is all. Now all you need to do is check the Pagerank of each site you visit, and only comment on sites that you are knowledgeable about. You often only need around 5 – 10 comments to hit the top spot. This may run for days or weeks. Your backlinks will remain there for as long as you comment. As you build up more and more of these sites in your armoury, simply outsoruce the whole job to keep those backlinks intact.

It can be very difficult to get your SEO indexed fast, so it is beneficial to have access to websites that will publish your articles etc. and get them indexed fast. This in turn gets the site you are linking to indexed quickly too. One of the best methods, if not the best method, of backlinking and indexing is document storage and document storage.

Google has always seen sites like Scribd for example as being very authoritive, and ranks them as high as possible in a very short time. You can usually hit page one in a matter of minutes, and certainly get ranked in the top 5 pages easily. One way people use this technique is for breaking news items, as they rank extremely high very fast. If you are covering a hot topic in your niche, then the document will rank high up for the keyword, and then you can channel that traffic right at your site. This is also true of reviews on products, and other niche marketing methods.

By using sites like Scribd, DocStoc and many others, you can upload articles that are written in Word documents, Open Office documents and slideshows, and have them uploaded and indexed in a matter of minutes. The great thing about these documents, is that there is no limit to the amount of words you can use in the articles, and no limited to the amount of images & anchor texts. This means you can seriously optimise a block of content, either in slideshow or regular document format, and really get your keywords packed in there.

Once you get the hand of creating many different documents from one initial article, you can then get to the more advanced stages, such as adding meta tags to the document properties, to further enhance your SEO.

When you are looking for relevant places to advertise your website, you cannot really get much better than forums. They are a minefield for some people, but if you learn how to use them properly, and within the rules of the particular forum, they can be a goldmine. If the forum allows signatures, then you can put a link to your website in there and get some traffic flowing to your site for nothing. It will only cost your time, and will pay you dividends over many years. Your link will be on the internet as long as the forum is alive, and considering some big forums have been online since 1995 and going strong – it is genuinely a good investment of time.

If you can be the guy that provides the answers to people, then you can certainly be the one who gets a lot of traffic. People respect others who help people out, and if you can be that guy – then you will get the traffic. All you need to do is look for the questions that people are asking the most, and then go and research the product/service. You can usually find answers on places like Yahoo! Answers or Wikianswers. There’s also millions of online blogs. If you are willing to do the digging, and you enjoy helping people, this could end up being your sole source of traffic. A lot of people get traffic daily by helping people like this. If you get a reputation for being the forum’s ‘go to guy’, people are more likely to take what you say as authoritative, and any link you post will be followed. This is a good place to be.

If you cannot find the answer to a question, you can still actually participate in the conversation, by doing a little research on the niche, and then posting a comment. Even this has the capability to get traffic.

When your visitors arrive at your site, there is a great way of retaining their interest, and actually getting their contact details that most marketers now use. The method is of course free ebooks and guides, in return for their email address and name. You will see a small optin capture box on a home page on a blog, which will say something like “register now for a completely free guide on such and such niche”. This is a very powerful way of getting both the interest piqued in your prospect, and getting their contact details for future upsells. The problem most people have with this is the content itself. A 3000 word ebook is quite costly when you are looking for quality, and PLR is a little bit of a problem most times, because it is quite often rehashed information that they have read elsewhere on the internet.

The quickest way to get 3000 words together for a free guide is to head over to Wikianswers and Yahoo! Answers. They will have lots of questions about your niche on there, usually, and then you can be assured of the answers because this is the whole reason these sites are set up. When you put together a “Top 25 Tips on Dog Breeding” or whatever your niche is, the visitor will be very quick to give their email address, because a) it is free, and b) it is completely related to why they are there in the first place. You can find questions and answers on almost any subject, and you can usually guarantee that the content will be totally unique to the reader – because very few people use this method of gathering content. You only need to rewrite it a very small amount for it to be unique, and people will never notice that this is content from the web. Nobody ever reads through an entire questions site…

Before YouTube, can you remember how you used to search for videos online? Not many people can. They see YouTube as being the first and most popular video serving website, and it would naturally be the first place you would look, if you were looking for a video of something online. Google genuinely had to acknowledge that YouTube was becoming a superpower on the internet, and in 2006 acquired YouTube to the tune of $1.65billion. With all that said, and with the traction YouTube has now built up, you can safely say that Google, along with the other search engines, gives a lot of credence to video online.

Google is particularly interested in your website if you display multimedia, and even more interested if you have the media rich content that they own. Never more has it been more apparent that including video, images and other media on your website can actually curry favour with the search engines.

Embedding videos is a very simple task, and YouTube encourages it by giving you the opportunity to embed using different sizes and colours on every video they serve. Whatever your niche, you can simply find a video that fits the best, and then embed it on your blog. By adding some notes to the page, that accompany the video, Google sees this as highly relevant, and will strive to send visitors if the rest of your site is just as good. The trick is, do not overdo it. Far too many websites have YouTube videos being blasted to their pages using autoblogging software, and Google knows this.  If you fall into the same trap, then Google will discount this content as being very non-unique, and possibly rank you much lower. Use video as and when you need to, and observe the colour schemes that you have already to integrate the video better. With this in mind, you cannot go wrong.

There has been much concern over some of Facebook’s features being used for spamming. The best feature that has fallen into the wrong hands is Facebook’s tagging feature, which can be used very well for marketing, but unfortunately spammers use it to mass tag people, who have no interest in the link whatsoever.

Facebook tagging is another way of inviting people to look at a photo, link or page you find interesting online. You simply type the @ symbol, followed by the name of a friend in your friends list (or a page that you are connected to) and then the interesting info you have found. For the marketer, there are great ways to use this, such as posting links to new content on your site, and having THOUSANDS of people reading it.

For example, if you created a new post on your blog, which was a review of a product, with which you are affiliated, then you would be able to link to this page quite easily, on a very popular page that you are a fan of. So let’s say you are reviewing a marketing ebook that specialises in backlinking. You would make yourself a member of a fan page that is related to backlinking, and then write a short update on your wall, including the fan page name after the @ sign. E.g.: “ @Backlinking Group : This is a frank review of Backlinking Bonanza v3.0, and I’ve pulled no punches. Let me know what you think.” After the above text, click the Add Link button, and enter your URL. If you have a fan page – even better (because you will get a small icon pop up too in the update). This status update would then be posted to the fan page (which could have thousands of regular viewers), thus putting your link in front of those users – and getting traffic!

Blogging can be a pain in the butt if you do not want to spend time ensuring the site is up to standrads that search engines now demand.  They require more and more from a webmaster now, than ever before. Usually, it’s content. Content can make or break a site, and the only real longevity a site ever gets is from unique regular content being added, and Google seeing this happen over a length of time.

You can argue the point that most of the autoblogs out there are spinning content to 30% unique, and they are getting away with page one rankings with Google – but for how long? You really need to add enough content to ensure Google thinks you are an authority on your niche subject, and starts pumping traffic your way, based on this trust. That word has now become a beacon for most webmasters, because Trustrank is well and truly here. Google is now ranking sites NOT just based on their inbound links, but also on their outbound links (amongst other things under the Trustrank banner). If your site has no selfless outbound links – which can link to any site – then your site has less chance of ranking higher. The best place to observe this is on website flipping sites like Flippa.com. You can check the micro-niche blogs that advertise Amazon products. These guys rank up high in the SERPs, and all include Trustrank methods. You will see few that do not have outbound links in their sidebars…

Another big deal over at Google HQ has always been backlinks. You may have seen recently that Angela and PJ’s backlinks have been penalized by Google, and their sites have received a drop in Pagerank. This is testament to the fact that all your backlinking activities should be natural and relevant. Always be wary of purchasing backlinks – it may harm your site if you do!

You could honestly sit for around two hours banging your head on the desk once white page syndrome begins in niche hunting. The most common niche blog on the net today (after internet marketing) is Amazon and Clickbank review sites which affiliate with companies, and have Adsense built in. The ease in which somebody can begin a website from scratch, and then have a fully working blog, full of content is stunningly fast – even for newbies. The clear winner, though, has to be Amazon products. A method was discussed on a few forums regarding setting up very basic sites which have one to four images, and then just a quick article about the product. Around the article, and the site itself is Adsense. Besides the Adsense, there is a link to Amazon for the actual product. The speed in which these sites convert is unthinkable, only the problem often can be FINDING a niche product in the first place. If you started to look for a product now on Amazon that you could compete for, it would most likely take you a while, by looking at best sellers lists all you are doing is looking at heavily competitive products. By surfing aimlessly through Amazon, you are wasting time. You cannot win.

A site which will cut down this time fast is Brand Name Coupons which houses a great little page that links you direct to the best deals on Amazon. The reason this site is so useful, is that you can literally log on the internet every day, and pick 100’s of products that will get the attention of your visitors. Instead of a single page site, you can have pages and pages of products, all up to 90% off RRP. This will certainly get them interested enough to click through to your site, and of course through to Amazon itself.