Your Link Investment Strategy: What’s Your Link ROI?
Posted on November 21, 2007 - Filed Under Blog Tips
In the world of blogging, links equals money. Stock brokers trade company stocks, money brokers trade in currency, and bloggers trade in links. Think about it. The whole idea of monetizing your blog is to build enough traffic so that advertisers will pay you good money to link to them. Whether it’s in the form of a banner or text link, its the connection from your site to theirs that they want.
While a link is free for you to give, it does not necessarily mean that it costs you nothing nor that it doesn’t buy you anything. Why do I say that?
1. Your PageRank Calculation. While big bloggers like John Chow can afford to dismiss the importance of their PageRank on Google, any starting or medium-sized blog will want to pay more attention to their PR as it translates to search engine traffic and higher advertising dollars for paid ads.
What determines your PageRank then? For those of you who are more mathematically inclined, you can read a detailed explanation on the calculation of your PageRank at Web Workshop. For those of you who prefer not to delve into complicated calculations, PageRank is simply the number of inbound links to your blog, multiplied by the PageRank value of the linking page, divided by the number of outbound links. If you understand this, you will realise that by giving out links from your blog, you are deducting from your PageRank value unless the links are part of a link baiting strategy, or designed to bring in huge waves of traffic as in resource lists.
2. Gaining High PageRank Votes. Looking at the above explanation on PageRank again, you see that the value of an incoming link is also affected by the PageRank of the page that is linking to you. The higher the PageRank of the referring page, the higher the value of the “vote” it gives to your blog. So if all your inbound links come from pages with a high PR, that will raise the PR of your page as compared to getting more links from other blogs that have a lower PR than yours. Therefore it makes sense that when you are building links to your blog, you aim to link bait blogs that are of a significantly higher PR than yours. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t link to blogs which may be of the same PR as yours but which contain great value.
The Value of Investing in Good Links
To share with you a recent exercise where I learned quite a few lessons about how far links can get you, I will walk you through my latest trial of Google Sitemap.
Part of steps in getting indexed by Google, is to ensure that you have a sitemap for Google to crawl. That is where a useful Webmaster tool like Google Sitemap comes in handy. I have not read any reviews of it, but what I discovered from the statistics shown there taught me a big lesson: having a link investment strategy pays.
While Google Analytics will help you analyze the bulk of your traffic flow and its trends, it does not give you an index of all the external links there are to your site. And it is worth your while to do an analysis of where all your external links are.
What I discovered stunned me a little until I explored where they came from, and there were definitely a few surprises there. I have a total of 85 incoming links to my blog with 43 of them linking to my front page. At this moment, I am only aware of 2 external links to my blog coming from:
- Skelliewag for my article on “Overcome Writer’s Block with a Writing Process” in her October Tumblr list, and
- a review of Ivy Online by Optempo.
Where were the other links coming from?
1. A large part of them were from the comments I made at other blogs like John Chow, Skelliewag, and Problogger. Most bloggers do not add a nofollow tag to their comment boards, which means the comments you leave are permanent links from these blogs to you.
2. Another large portion of links were coming from Technorati. Early during my few professional posts, I noticed that referrals from Technorati formed a large part of my traffic. This was somewhat of a mystery to me as I hadn’t touched my technorati account for almost a year. Using Google Sitemap, I was shocked to realise that many of my links in technorati came from John Chow, Skellie, Problogger and Michael Martine’s technorati profile. Upon closer inspection, it finally dawned on me that as Technorati indexed inbound links to these sites under “reactions” to their blog, a lot of my earlier posts which frequently referred links to these sites, were being indexed under the accounts of these big bloggers. It finally solved the mystery of the consistent stream of technorati visits to my site.
3. Sphinn-ed Links. A recently emerging social networking site, Sphinn is attracting the newer generation of bloggers. Getting an article submission noticed in Digg as a new blogger is virtually impossible as it is gamed by top users. In addition, the unhappy relationship between Kevin Rose and top users was aggravated by another outrage involving deletion of accounts / diggs submitted of a HD DVD encryption code that allowed people to unlock the code and duplicate DVDs.
As a result, many bloggers are seeking other social network sites that are a lot smaller than Digg, and without gamers, to get their articles noticed and voted by other members. Besides StumbleUpon, Sphinn is such a social networking media, and I had previously submitted an article of mine there (they encourage that) and totally forgot about it. I got 4 votes from my submission, and gained 15 links from the Sphinn network. Not a bad result for just 1 article submission.
4. Stumbled Pages were Indexed by Google. Moving on from links statistics to indexed pages, I realised that the pages that had been stumbled are now indexed by Google and had a vote to it.
What Did I Learn?
The value of a link is not the link itself, but where it is placed. You have to view it as an investment. While it is impossible to physically calculate out the weight of each link in terms of how it will affect your PR status, but by carefully choosing who you want to link to and where you want to create inbound links from, you can increase the value of your traffic and site significantly.
- Direct links from other blogs will bring you a quick, short windfall of traffic and are the most valuable yet short lived.
- Comment links deposited at top blogs are like bonds that do not bring quick returns, but accrue a steady stream of visitors and readers over a long period of time. To date, apart from stumbled pages of popular articles, the next highest number of referred links come from top blogs that I regularly comment at.
- Linking to other top blogs creates link baiting opportunities as well as deposits “reaction” links in their Technorati accounts. This is a win win situation as the blogs get a higher technorati ranking while you get a link referral.
- To check out the smaller, less popular but growing social network sites like Sphinn.
What is your strategy of link investment? What other linking tips have you learned that is not listed here?
Don't miss any of my posts by
subscribing to my feed!
Comments
4 Responses to “Your Link Investment Strategy: What’s Your Link ROI?”
Leave a Reply
When it comes to marketing, I believe in the dynamics of creative thinking and traditions.
To me the traffic a link means nothing, compared to the value it has as a backlink. I personally set monthly quotes for my own personal link acquisition rate. I’ve found it works wonders for organic traffic, but with a family I only have time to build around 50 - 70 links a month. Cheers.
That is an interesting comment, and thanks for pointing it out. When I wrote the blog review of John Chow, I inserted many links to articles he wrote simply because they were relevant to the points I was making.
What I didn’t realise that they were creating a high number of backlinks from his comment boards. This led to a number of visitors coming over for a read from John Chow’s blog, and the man himself even paid a visit.
While I wouldn’t recommend doing that too often (you could get yourself banned from comment boards), a well strategized backlinking method will get you some notice.
[…] Your Link Investment Strategy: What’s Your Link ROI? is the latest article to get stumbled, and though the first spike was not as large as other stumbles, it has a long tail end and has been consistently bringing new visitors to my site since it got stumbled, slowly rising from second last position to second rank for the most number of StumbleUpon visitors. This article also brought in the highest number of subscribers. […]