Link Building Strategies – Tip 1 Rank Lists

Create your own Rank Lists and get away with some cool backlinks

Back to some basics alright…it’s always fun to talk about this.

Okay so for all the new/young/budding up bloggers out there, from whatever “interaction” I had with some of them, I sensed that, alarmingly many of the young bloggers out there have wonderful, striking ideas with them. They just need a platform to show it.

In fact, some of them were so brilliant that I couldn’t help getting involved with it. Now, the problem with most young bloggers is that they have very little patience. Let me underline “most young bloggers”.

In a hurry burry to make it big, they set out, write some posts, pick an awesome theme, tweak it a bit, register for al the social media channels, and wait for the magic to happen. But unfortunately, things aren’t as simple as that. There is of course a lot more to do and study. And I don’t know if I can present it well here, but nevertheless it’s an attempt to help you – hope you’ll like it.

Link Baits – as you might have already heard and discussed is a great tool to get some traction and momentum on your blog.

But let me be very honest with you. I don’t believe in link baits.

I believe in link baits that are called something else and not link baits.

Do you get my point?

That is, anything that people know to be are link baits, just don’t click. They remain a link bait, they don’t fire.

So the magic is in disguising a link bait to be something else. Let me share with you an effective link bait that may not sound like one, but actually is.

There was a blog (there are many still) that had a rank listing of the top 100 blogs in the blogosphere on Blogging Tips.

Now, this was a very young blog, struggling to find traffic. This clever man, went about making a program on Microsoft Excel that will list and sort 100 blogs based on their RSS feed counter, Alexa ranking, Technorati Inlinks etc and list them out on a page.

He also made it a point to write emails to each and every blogger out there (listed) telling him the exciting news ! That their blog is listed among the top hundred blogs on the blogosphere. He also sent a press release kind of document along with the email giving the details of the list.

Now, initially, this was a lot of work. But eventually, the rank list page gathered up hell lot of backlinks, mainly from all the 100 of the list, and additionally from the rest of the blogosphere.

Now, there’ was a cleverly hidden agenda here.

Apart from the top 5 position which was taken by the well known bloggers, 95 of the rest were listings from established yet struggling blogs (let’s say promising ones ).

The author made it a point that they should all be blogs that would get excited about listing and not the “real top 100” who would’ve been listed already on all possible rankings and would ignore his listing.

At the end of the day – He got all the attention from the blogosphere and gathered all (valuable backlinks from the best blogs on the internet.

Now, I’m not sure if he nofollowed all the outgoing links from the list. Could be a possibility.)

So essentially the LInkBait Tip for the day is to create Rank Lists. Of course I know, anyone reading this would go right ahead create a rank list, but that’s not the fun part of the game.

- Find out niches where your ranking algorithm will be a success.
- Find out variety in rank selection. If 2 years earlier it was Technorati, this time go for Digg.
- Make it look very authoritative. At least very genuine.
- Create a page on your blog that will be easy to link to.
- Launch an email marketing campaign to boost the plan.

If you get the idea, spend some time discussing it with your partners and colleagues, find what they are interested in and implement it.

[Meanwhile, this is a part of the Link Building Strategies Week on DSB. Until December, you will get more Link Bulding Tips from me, with examples. So stay glued!]

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