Links Driving Traffic

In my constant search for knowledge in this thing called blogging, I’ve learned a lot about links, specifically in bound links. Links from any site are good, but sites from more highly rated (in terms of traffic, Alexa rankings, Google, etc.) are best.

John Chow of John Chow.com is sponsoring an event in which he gives people link love just for writing a post linking to him with specific linked text. He’s up to batch 38 with each batch containing anywhere from approximately 5-15 blogs who have written about him and linked to him.

Recently, he’s changed the rules and now requires bloggers to link to his blog and the specific post with language that goes something like:

John Chow dot Com is a blog that helps you make money online. He is offering to link to your blog if you review his blog.

Linkbuilding
At a minimum, he’s getting say 10×38 or 380 links. Of course, he’s getting a nice bump from those in bound links and if one of those happens to be from a highly ranked site he does he even better.

More importantly, he’s rising in Google organic results for the search term “make money online,” presumably a very valuable search term, which could drive him a ton of traffic. He’s now fifth if you type this term into Google. He’s also just cracked the top 100 on Technorati.

So What?I guess the whole point of this post is the more traffic you drive to your site (caused by a variety of factors-great content, links from other bloggers, appearing in search term results, etc.), the higher that site climbs in rankings and also in value to advertisers. A company such as Text-Link-Ads that pays a flat $50 to be on a site that gets 100,000 page views vs. 500,000 page views monthly, is paying a much different effective CPM.

Not only can you garner links in such a deliberate fashion as this but you can earn them by guest authoring another blog, adding comments to another blog that accepts your URL and of course writing relevant and insightful content.

These are all things that I continue learn as I continue my quest to learn more about the blogosphere. What do you think about working so hard to get links just to build your sites rankings? Some like it, some think bloggers should earn their links as opposed to creating or participating in efforts to drive traffic to one another.

There are certainly two schools of thought….as for me, I’m just enjoying watching. Maybe I’ll sponsor a competition asking bloggers to guess how many “batches” of link love John Chow will give out…hmmm, now that could drive some traffic. ; )

Tags: blogging, links, marketing, john chow.com, alexa, google, rankings, search results, content

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