Members. All blogs that have great longevity have got members, and you will notice more and more that people are offering free newsletters, updates on articles, extra content and more when you visit their blog. When you have a member base on your blog, you effectively have a captive audience, which you can keep updated with all your latest offers and updates. It is a very good thing to have extra content available on a weekly basis for these members, because they will follow links through to your site, and that steady stream of traffic will keep returning week after week. You must never over-market this list either. It is generally not a good idea to send out offers to them at all until you have had them as members for a long time, receiving free information and such. WordPress does not have this built in as standard, so you have to be creative and use plugins, or at least use AWeber or a similar autoresponder that can send out offers at a time you specify.

If you start by offering free information, and build their trust and respect as a blogger, you can then begin to send out paid offers or links to affiliate sites later on. Using AWeber to manage your list is much easier than using WordPress plugins, and you can send out a ‘paid’ email 28 days after the initial contact email, so your member has had free content for almost a month before you hit them with a paid ad.

Most people assume they have to create new content regularly for their members to ensure they retain them. This is not always the case. If you wrote up a synopsis of a great article you found on another marketer’s site, and linked them to your blog to read that synopsis… and THEN linked to the marketer’s blog – then this is a great way of keeping your readers entertained, as well as providing great free content as a build up to a paid ad.

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.