Backlinks 4 - Commenting

Almost all marketing comes down to whether people know you. (As they say in Hollywood, it's not who you know, it's who knows you.)

And they need to know you for good things, not bad. That's why all of those "power" efforts to spam announcements of articles don't work so well. If all anybody sees of you is an ad, then they think of you as an ad. They start to think of you as the spam they didn't want with their breakfast.

So as I mentioned in previous backlinks post about signatures, just having your contact information available as you interact normally is a great way to start. You can use the same principle, though, well beyond email.

Commenting on blogs is an easy way to do this. Different sites have different rules, but they almost always have a place in the comment form to ad an URL. It's usually not displayed, but rather it's embedded in your name when you comment. So it works like a sig, in that if somebody wants to know more about you, they just click on your name and they'll be taken to the page you entered there.

There are two very important things to think about before you do this, though:

One: Nobody is going to click on your name if your comment isn't interesting or useful. If it smells even a little bit like spam, the proprietor is likely to delete it, too. Your comment should be relevant, and interesting in and of itself. It should NOT say "hey, here's an article that relates to this topic, go and read it." One way to make things interesting is to give an opinion. It can even be a controversial opinion as long as it is respectful. (Again, the proprietor will delete disrespectful comments.) "That's a great point, although I prefer this for that reason" is a great post, if your reasons are well spelled out.

Or when in doubt ask a question. Even if nobody answers, you have at least contributed to the usefulness of the discussion.

Your other major issue is that you can only put in one URL, though, so which page do you put in? Some people like to put their article that is closest to the subject, and that's a pretty good idea, although you really have to be prepared with a list of possible URLs at hand whenever you go reading blogs and newspapers.

This is why many people end up creating their own web page or blog, where they can put an index of articles. That way they can concentrate on promoting just one URL. Other people promote their eHow profile page.

One consideration: many blogs have restrictions on who can comment. You may have to have a Google Blogger account - and if so, the link always goes to your Blogger profile. It can be good to set up a profile with appropriate links in each location where you might want to comment on blogs - Blogger, LiveJournal, etc. Many blogs use Open ID, which is a site where you set up an ID account, and it does something similar across a wider range of services.

Profile pages are as important as sigs. I'll be the first to admit I don't make good use of them, but the masters of marketing DO, and if you are serious about marketing, you should always be thinking about your profile pages. Remember that the key to marketing is that you want people to like, or at least trust, you. They will be interested in your product only after they find out you are a person who doesn't waste their time.

Next time I'll talk a little about using Yahoo Answers as a promotional tool. (Just remember, as with any community, they HATE SPAM at Yahoo Answers, and you should only use this to genuinely answer questions. If you don't do this right, you could lose your whole Yahoo account!)

Previous backlinks posts:
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks - blogging
Backlinks - signature files

Backlinks 3 - Signature Files

The biggest thing you can do to promote a web page is to put the URL in the signature file of your email or newsreader program.

Some of you may not know what a "sig" file is. You've probably seen them, though. At the bottom of an email, many people have an address or a quote. It usually appears after a line with pair of dashes on it like "-- ". The great thing about it is that it is always there, and as long as you adhere to the rules of sig file etiquette, it doesn't bother anybody. It's just there, so anybody who gets email from you has a reference to your URL.

It's like a business card, in that way. Very handy and yet unobtrusive.

And like a business card, it can be surprisingly effective. I remember once when a couple of people got into an email battle at work. It was one of those things where people keep adding more and more people to the cc line. I wasn't working that day, but I happened to be the one person who could give the one bit of information that could settle the dispute, so I emailed the whole group from home. My home computer automatically puts my private website in the sig of anything I send from there.

When I checked my web stats that night, I saw that within an hour of that email, every single person on the distribution list had hit my website.

Now, normally sigs are not that effective. You don't get hits on every email you send. Sometimes you don't get hits for months on any email you send. But that story illustrates the magic of sig files. AND it illustrates the magic of how to use them.

See, I didn't tell people to go visit my website. What I did was resolve a problem they were all having. Many of those people were really annoyed at being a witness to this series of emails, and then I put an end to the argument. That got their attention. And then, because my web address was so handy, and they were curious, they all clicked.

The thing about a signature is that people are going to respond to you most when you aren't trying to get them to respond. You may even get their attention at one time, but they don't click until they see another more boring message from you. But whenever they do get around to being curious about you, a signature is always there. The magic of the sig is that it's handy.

Nearly all the best methods of getting backlinks are in some way based on the signature principle. I'll talk later about commenting on other people's blogs, or using Yahoo Answers. While you don't use email to do either of these, there is an unobtrusive place to link in both cases that works much like a sig.

In the meantime, learn how to add a sig to your email. (And if you read any old fashioned newsgroups with a news reader, these often have sig files built in too.) There are many eHow articles, not written by me, that tell you about how to add a sig in your particular email program. You can search on "email signature" at eHow.

I will just end with a little bit about signature etiquette. The shorter the better. Never use more than three lines. People don't like a sales pitch, but a one-liner and link is fine. Better yet is just the link - all by itself. Think of this as a business card. For eHow, I would suggest linking to your profile page, or if you've created your own directory of your articles on a blog or website, connect to that.

(Those of you who have written articles about how to add a sig to specific email programs are welcome to post a link in the comments section of this posting.)

The Backlinks Series:
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks - blogging
Backlinks - signature files
Backlinks - commenting

Backlinks Ideas: Blogging

You may note the previous post featured backlinks to some eHow articles. Writing your own blog is one way to get some blacklinks going. You can legitimately link to your own articles.

A blog or website can also be a convenient place to keep an "index" of your articles to refer people to. Many eHowers maintain a website which has a page just for this purpose. You can cluster articles of a certain subject into a single page or group and make it easier for readers to find more articles of the same kind by you. You can also announce your articles, or provide an RSS feed to these announcements.

However, these kinds of backlinks won't give you the quality points that I mentioned in the "What is a Backlink" post. Pages that have a whole lot of links but not a lot of text look suspicious to Google's bots - especially if there seems to be a pattern of linking among a couple of sites. Like, say, you have five blogs and they are each full of links to each other and to your eHow articles. That's what would be called a "link farm" and Google considers it to be spamming their search engines, and if you do it too much, they may blacklist your ehow pages, and put your blogs in the sandbox.

Google, however, can tell the difference between a legitimate index and a "spamdex", so don't be afraid to create an individual blog or website to act as an index for you. Think more of the readers and less of the search engines, and odds are you will do the kinds of things Google is looking for - group the articles by relevance, add notes about them if you think it would be useful to the readers.

The better way you can use a blog, though, takes more work. If you have a subject that you write on a lot, then why not start a blog on that subject? You can use it for several purposes: one is to announce your latest articles on the subject, but even better is if you get ideas for articles that aren't how tos, you have a place to put them - and you can link back to your eHow articles. Such a blog, of course, can potentially make you some money too. You won't have the rank of eHow, but if you create a quality site, it will eventually get the traffic you need to start making a little side money, while improving the ranking of your eHow articles.

However, this works best if your blog has an overall subject that matches the subject of your eHow articles. The backlinks in my last post will get a little boost because the post is relevant to the links, but this blog is not about parenting or a summer activities. That whole article would mean more on a parenting blog.

I'll talk about more ways to sew your own backlinks soon.

The Backlinks Series:
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks - blogging
Backlinks - signature files
Backlinks - commenting

What Is A Backlink?

If somebody likes your article, they'll probably bookmark it If they really like your article, they'll tell others about it.

For instance, further down this article, I'm going to tell you about my favorite marketing guru, Seth Godin, and in that section, I will provide a link to his blog. That link is called a "backlink." Not long after I post this, bots from Google or other search engines, will crawl through this site and they will make note of that backlink.

The backlink info will go into Google's databases, and next time Google reviews page rankings, it will use backlink data as a part of how it figures out how important Mr. Godin's blog is to the universe. (Google, btw, doesn't review page rankings every day. There are certain things they run every three months, and other things ever six months. That's one reason your SEO efforts don't often have an immediate effect, and also why sometimes you will get a sudden bump.)

Backlinks aren't all there is to deciding pagerank, but they are pretty important. The thing to remember, though, is that Google doesn't just judge number of backlinks - they put particular emphasis on quality and relevance. This is why it is not a good idea to try to cheat the system. Google is really good at spotting these cheats these days.

Now... how does Google judge the quality and relevance of my backlink to Seth Godin?

Well, I'm pretty darned sure that this blog, since it is brand new, has a ranking of zero. I'm not going to do him much good based on my reputation. If Seth posted a link to MY blog, he could do me a lot of good, even if it were a junk link. He's a best selling author with millions of subscribers. He's a marketing guy, and they made an action figure of him, for goodness sakes! But he's not going to link to me unless I say or do something really "remarkable" (which is on of his buzzwords and the real reason he is being mentioned later on here). And that's part of why his backlinks mean something.

But my backlink does mean something based on other factors. This page is a "quality" page, in that it has an actual post, and it's a long and thorough one. This isn't just a bunch of links. And the text of this post not only talks about Seth himself, but the main subject of this post is related to the main subject of his blog - which is marketing and word-of-mouth.

So my backlink may not have a high rank, but it is high quality.

Which brings me to Seth Godin himself. One of his major precepts is that shortcut marketing is dead. You can no longer buy people's attention. The key to marketing, he says, is the Purple Cow. A purple cow is something that gets your attention to the point that you feel like remarking on it to someone else. In otherwords, it's something "remarkable."

The most important thing you can do to get backlinks is to write an article that is so interesting or so useful or so perfect for their needs, that they feel like telling others about it. For an eHow article, people are most likely to remark on an article that made their day. Maybe it helped them resolve a probelm, or maybe it just showed them how some task they were dreading wasn't so hard to do. Maybe it finally explained something that had been frustrating them for years.

If you're going to make someone's day, your title and keywords have to not only match your subject, your article has to truly pay off on those keywords. The people looking for you have to be able to find you, and they won't if you warp your title to include keywords that have a higher CPC but doesn't really draw the same audience as the article should. If you attract a higher paying audience who isn't really looking for what you have to say, they WON'T backlink to you.

You get the most leverage by creating content that will attract the people most likely to say something about your article.

Later I will post about ways you can sew a few backlinks of your own.

The Backlinks Series:
What is a Backlink?
Backlinks - blogging
Backlinks - signature files
Backlinks - commenting