Image via WikipediaEarlier in the series of this post ,I have helped you to answer one of the questions to choose most popular social network for your blog. Now I will move on to the next question- What do you want social sites to do for your blog?

As I have said earlier , social sites can be used in a variety of ways. They can be used to drive traffic to your blog, they can be used to build relationships and increase sales or they can even be used to build links for your blog. So, answer of this question is quite important for choosing right social media site. Let us expand this in foollowing paragraphs.



Social sites of choice if you are there to drive traffic-

This is probably most important reason why bloggers participate actively in social sites. The most efficient social sites in this regard are stumble upon and digg. Of course, there are some other second tier choices like reddit and newsvine. So, if you are there for traffic you should focus on these sites.You don't have to actively participate in conversations here, only thing you have to do is bookmark your posts and encourage your readers to do the same.

Social media sites of choice to build relationships-

One of the reasons why you need to build relationships with others is because you want to win trust or you want to highlight yourself as an expert of some field.For this you need to be personal with your target audience.You have to converse with them. And that is why, you have to choose a social media site that has a messaging interface to make connections with others.Facebook ,orkut and different forums in your niche are excellent examples where you can communicate with others.

Social media site of choice to build links-

Yeah !!! social media sites can be used effectively to build links and increase your pagerank.For this you need to research and find out which bookmarking sites don't use "no follow". Some of the examples of social media sites that don't use "nofollow" are furl and blinklist.There are still some more and I am working on it.I will produce a list of dofollow social sites soon.



So, you can see ,how the answer to the above mentioned question dictates the choice of the social media site. Most of the times you have many reasons to use social sites.For example ,you wish to increase hits on your blog as well as build links from social sites.In this case the choice can be different.Just find out what do you want from social site and choose the one that fulfills your need.In every case, focus your attention only on 2-3 social sites as it is not possible to focus on every site that comes your way.

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Most of the bloggers will tell you to comment on other blogs and forums and submit your blog to directories to build links.There are many other ways they usually talk about.I know these are very effective ways of building links for your blog. But problems with building links this way are-

• Often you get a 'no follow' links specially if you are commenting on other blogs to build links.(Most of the blogs now use 'no follow' in comments) Many of the directories also befool you by using either 'no follow' or robot.txt.
• You can build links for your homepage and other 2-3 pages only.Most of the directories don't allow inner pages and in forums you can only leave 1-4 links in your signature.

Now what you are going to learn here in this post is an unique way of building links. By using this technique you will be able to build links for any no. of pages (even all of your posts) and most importantly it will be 'do follow'. So, stick yourself with your seat as you are going to discover a very unique way of building links.


I discovered this technique only a week ago and felt I should share it with my readers.Actually this technique makes use of google docs and spreadsheets.Confused !! I can guess you are..... OK let me explain the things in a bit more detail.


First of all log into google docs using google account.If you don't have a google account you can open an account here for free.Once you log in to google docs the page looks something like this-

(click to enlarge the image)

Using the 'new' button on the top left corner (as indicated by a red arrow in image) you can make a new document, spreadsheet or a presentation.You can write anything relevant in your document. You can make a list of your posts, you can make a list of your top posts , you can describe your blog or even write a short post there.While preparing your document embed your blog's link or your post's link in the document. Once you finish preparing the document you can publish it as a webpage.Look at the picture below-

(Click to enlarge the image)

In the image above, you can see my spreadsheet which contains a list of RSS directories.In the right side you can see the 'publish as webpage' button under 'Share' (encircled in red and indicated by a red arrow).Once you publish your document it is published at a unique url.My document can be seen here.This document now behaves in exactly the same way as other webpage.

So, just make a document with some of the links from your blog.Publish it and congrats you have built some links for your blog.Make more documents daily and see the links building for your blog.Isn't this cool.

The best part is the links will be 'do follow' (I have checked this and found no 'no follow' tags)

There are many other websites similar to google docs.Just google it and you will get a number of these sites.You can use any of them or all of them.
Happy linking!!!

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As I have already said in my previous post on link building by post exchange through smorty that link building is getting tougher and tougher for bloggers.In this post I will talk about ten powerful ways to build links. The ways or tips I will talk about here are working pretty fine and most importantly they are free (absolutely free rather!!)

So, without wasting your much of the time I am going to discuss all the points one by one. Here comes the first one-

1) Write quality content which stands out of the crowd-

This is the most powerful way of building links. If you are generating some good quality content and you are doing it consistently other bloggers will give away links to you without you asking for it.

Here I would like to make it clear that not all types of content will give you links. There are some specific type of content which will give you more links than others. In general an updated unique content or a controversial post will bring you more links than other types of post. But while writing a controversial post you must have some solid facts to support your controversial points or it may bounce back on you and your reputation will go down.

2) Tag your internal links with rel=”tag” attribute-

This is very little known technique of building links. The beauty of this tip is that you get oneway link by just adding a code in your internal links.To link to some page you use the code which looks something like this-

To build links you need to use the code like this-

Note that ,I have just added a small piece of code “rel=tag” (in red) to the existing one.

You might be wondering how does it works. Well working of this method is simple. Some of the services like, Technorati ,icerocket etc. allow you to tag your posts.The spiders used by them recognizes rel=tag attribute and indexes them on their pages and this indexed page of yours act as a live link for your blog which is one way and does follow.

3) Make some videos and upload them on sites like youtube-

Youtube can be used to build links for your blog as well as drive some trffic if your video is liked by the users. But here I will talk about link building only. Well once you start uploading your videos on youtube , you have to fill up some form before uploading. In the description of the video you may give a live link back to your blog.

The disadvantage of this method is that you are not able use an anchor text for your link.

4) Guest posts on other blog-

You can write guest posts on other blogs.This is a win win situation as the other blog gets content and you get links for your blog. So, try to persuade other bloggers to write a guest post on their blog.Also, the links you get will be contextual which according to google are more valued than other links.

5) Press releases-

I have not seen many bloggers doing this but believe me this is one of the most advantageous way of building links. If you have anything worth mentioning or announcing to the world then you must consider a press release.It also brings some popularity and some traffic to your blog.

6) Submit your blog to web directories-

Submit your blog to as many directories as you can. This is proven way of building traffic to your blog. There are many softwares available on the net which can submit your blog to many directories at once. But make the process gradual.It is better to submit your blog to a dozen directories at a time than to submit to 1000 directories all at once.

7) Article marketing-

Article marketing is writing some content which others can use on their site or blog with a link back to your blog through the authors bio. This is done through the article directories. All you need to do is write some good articles and submit it to as many article directories as you can. There are several article submitter softwares available on the internet. Just download anyone of those and submit your articles to several article directories all at once.

8) Comment on other related blogs-

Commenting on other blogs is a very time consuming way of link building as to get really profitable number of links you need to comment on hundreds of blogs and thousands of pages. But if it is done regularly on day by day basis it can really build some links for your blog in some months. If you are commenting to get links then you must make sure that links in comments are followed.

9) Be active in forums-

Forum is a place where people share there problems and get answers from other forum user. In most of the forums you are allowed to leave your signature with your blog’s address. So, the more active in forums you are the more links you will get for your blog. But this requires constant motivation for part time bloggers like me.

10) Participate in Groups like google and yahoo groups-

Google groups or yahoo groups is a place where people share their stuff or ask questions to other group members. It is just like forums and thus works pretty much in similar way as forums.So, just participate actively in groups and leave your signature with your blog’s address at the bottom and build links for free.

These are all free way of building links for your blog. But each of these require some active and constant motivation and patience to build some appreciable amount of backlinks. Although these ideas work slowly but they work quite perfectly. If you are about to use these ideas then don’t just expect things to occur overnight but I can guarantee that these tips will work once you are following them constantly.

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Every serious blogger knows the fact that building links for his/ her blog is essential to become successful as a blogger. This is because it is links which will give you high search engine rankings and decent traffic to the blog.


In recent times building links has been tougher than ever just because webmasters are getting more and more conscious about outgoing links and how more no. of outgoing links can affect their pagerank. Getting links from the same niche sites is still tougher as webmasters see it as giving away links to their competitors.


So, in present scenario bloggers are left with only three options to build links-


1) Buy some links. But not every blogger can buy some links for his blog and also buying links violates TOS of google.

2) Get links from unrelated blogs. But these sort of links will have lesser value if not completely devalued.
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3) Generate some quality content and wait for someone to link to them. But most of us including me would not like to wait that much.



The juice of above paragraphs is that it is very very hard to build links for your blog. It seems that folks at smorty have sensed this problem and came up with whole new concept of link building for bloggers.


Smorty has recently announced their post exchange feature according to which if you write a review of some blog , some other blog with similar rating as yours will write a review for your blog. Excellent feature, isn’t it?


Here I must tell you that the links you will get will be contextual links which according to google are more valued than other links. In short you will get high quality links from same or related niches by just writing a review on other blog. Link building can’t be less pain taking than this one.



Here I would like to emphasis one more point. The link you will get will not be reciprocal links. Let us suppose you write a review for blog A then blog A will not write review for you. Instead some other blog say, blog B will write review on your blog and blog C for blog B and so on. So, the links your blog or any other blog participating in this program gets is a one way link.You might be knowing that one way links are more valued than reciprocal or exchanged links. So, the links you get will be one way and more valued. Isn’t this cool !!!




What blogs can participate in this program ?

Although smorty follows several rules to approve the blogs but some important one are –

1) The blog should be around for at least 3 months to get approved.

2) It should have a regular posting frequency of at least 2 posts per week on an average.

3) The blog should not contain content which is defamatory, above 18 or spread hatred to a person or community.




Smorty has announced a perfectly well plan for building links when it is getting harder to get relevant links from other websites or blog. In my view this whole new program is worth trying for building links. I am planning to try this out for my blog and I will be commenting further on this program after using this service.

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