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This is the third installment of the Blogger appreciation week, found here.

I don’t know much about John Leonard of Master Networker’s MLM and Internet Marketing Blog for Professional Entrepreneurs other than what I have seen over the past two days checking out his blog. But I do know one thing for sure, he is a seller. Just combing through a few of his posts, I am almost tempted to sign up for some multi-level marketing programs. From a marketing standpoint, I should steal incorporate some of his techniques into my own blog.

John uses a lot of eye candy (words in different colors or in bold, not risky photos) to emphasize key phases and draw your attention to specific areas. Within the descriptions of products or different multi-level marketing programs, he is sure to state the credibility of the originator as well as the pros and some cons.

What I like the most:

The diversity of information on various different mlm programs, tips and tricks. He has some good info on building up a list here.

Quick point:

I would like to see some more success and failure stories. I know with mlm, the potential to fail is pretty high from time and time, and I think sharing those experiences could be very beneficial to anyone who is interested in a particular mlm program.

In a recent post, I mentioned I built backlinks for this blog and my girlfriend’s blog, www.thatmutt.com. A couple people asked me to explain more about what I did. Despite what many new bloggers believe, traffic isn’t everything. Break down where your traffic is coming from, dissect the numbers, and you’ll see. One visitor coming from a Google search is more likely to stick around, read your article, purchase your product or seek your advise than one random visitor from either Digg or StumbleUpon. I have said before that I would trade 1,000 unique visitors for one commenter / subscriber. In the end, it is the people who get involved that will add the most value to your blog. So here are some ways to build backlinks to your blog and dominate your niche.

1. Comment, comment and comment. I have about 60 blogs that I frequent on a regular basis and leave thoughtful comments when I do. I typically do this every 2-3 days to allow for people to update their blogs with new posts. If they have added more than one new post, I will try and comment on each new post. This builds my network. If you try this, you will find that in time they just might write a post about you or your blog. If people are writing about you and your niche, the search engine looks at that like you just won a gold star. Enough gold stars and you start to rank #1 in searches for your terms. You will have a higher ranking, more search engine traffic and better visitors coming to your blog. Problogger wrote about this yesterday and his blog receives 46% of its traffic from Google (P.S. he gets a lot of traffic).
2. Contests. I know most contests are a lot of work to maintain and it sucks to do them often, but they are a great way to build backlinks. The owner of the Winning the Web contest got a lot more from hosting the contest than any single person who won something. He received 1,000s of backlinks, more RSS readers and a lot of name recognition from hosting one contest. Here it is a month later, and I still know about the contest and where it was, and I never even entered it. The same goes for the contest held at Sense to Save. If you don’t want to take the time to cook up a contest, simply find all the contests you can, and donate something to them. I got about 20 backlinks from donating to the Sense to Save contest from other bloggers re-posting the list of donors ;).
3. Social networking and social linking. Before you start claiming I am a hypocrite, I will elaborate. I use social sites like Digg and StumbleUpon to build in anchor links. An anchor link is a link used in context with the keywords you want your site to rank higher in. For example, if I want my site to come up when people search the term “really expensive watches,” I would put the HTML <ahref=”http://www.joshwhitford.com/”>Really expensive watches</a> in the comments or description of the post I am submitting to the different social networking / bookmarking sites. The text “Really expensive watches” will be linked to my site. My site might never say anything about having “really expensive watches,” but if I get enough of these links out on the Internet, eventually I would rank #1 for the term. Ranking is all about links and link building. A great site to help with this is Social Poster. Other really good programs do this same thing but much faster like BookmarkingDemon. But if you don’t want to pay, then stick to the free ways of gaining backlinks. In a couple of weeks I have gone from page #10 on Google to page #1 for a variety of terms.
4. Get your link and keywords on sites and blogs with good Page Ranking (PR). I have done this a number of ways. I actually have a number of bookmarking folders in my browser that I have labeled PR1, PR2, PR3… and so on. When I come across a blog that has a good page rank, I will bookmark it for later. Then when I have the time, I will go through each folder and see what the source code is for each site and if they have a no follow tag for their comments or not. If you go under “view” and then “source” in your browser, it will open the code for that page as a search engine would see it. If there is a rel=”nofollow”> followed by the name and comment, then I won’t use that site as a method of gaining backlinks. If I like the site and it has good traffic, I should continue to leave intelligent comments (not spam) and gain the trickle traffic from curious people. Remember they are sharing their page rank with you and you should be thankful for that. Leaving worthless comments does you no good. Recently, I commented on Tim Ferriss’s blog about the post I wrote about contacting Warren Buffett. The comment section is a “no follow,” but the links found in the post are normal “follow” links. When he took the information and link from the comment and inserted it into the post I gained a link from a blog with a PR6 (more to this but this is the basic idea).
5. Pay, bribe, barter and swap. I don’t recommend purchasing or advertising the sale of links. The reason against it is simple. If someone wants your spot on the search page and knows you have paid for links, you are one report away from being kicked to the Google curb. If you can barter or swap links either in posts or with things like Entrecard credits, then it is much harder to prove any wrongdoing with Google or other search engines. This is why blogs who take on PayPerPost tend to get taken to the woodshed come time for page rank updates. Google knows when you are promoting sites for money and will punish you for “gaming” their algorithm. This is why John Chow doesn’t even show up on page #1 for his name. It really doesn’t matter for him if he shows up on page #1 because he makes good money selling paid links and ads on his blog. But, if a blog gets most of its traffic from Google and gets sent to page 5, then that could destroy that url’s future for traffic. Tread lightly and research before you act on the Internet.

This by no means is a complete list of ways to gain backlinks or is it the complete ins and outs of SEO. But the more you play, the better you will become. Everything about search ranking and page rank is based on the foundation of good backlinks and anchor text links. The more links you have pointing towards your blog on certain keywords, the higher you will rate for relevancy of those keywords. Nothing is impossible, and if you would like to rank #1 for Business you can, although you might spend 2 years building backlinks to do so.

I can’t say enough how much fun the Bon Jovi concert was on Saturday night. I am playing a little catch up but I am sure you will enjoy. Don’t forget that on the video there are little dots and those are embedded comments or links to sites I talk about. Enter the contest and get some free traffic.

That is right, I am doing another contest until the end of the month. I am sure there is something for everyone. Just to clarify, all new and current RSS subscribers are eligible. If you are receiving this by RSS to your email, here is the link for the video. On a separate note, I really need to get a better microphone for these videos. I am using the stock one on the webcam and it picks up a lot of white noise. I even tried to put a noise filter over it without any success. Anyone know of any noise canceling software like the BOSE headphones?

Sitehoppin is a cross between a paid-for Wiki, like the Million Dollar Wiki, StumbleUpon and Entrecard all rolled into one. And does it deliver. I bought a couple of pages from Max, the founder of Sitehoppin.com, and I am not disappointed in the least. I got 2,916 unique page views to our two sites in the last week. Max has also offered the viewers of the Unconventional Marketing Blog a 25% discount on all purchases using the affiliate link I have provided, here.

Getting Started

First, I signed up for a login to the site and got to know the layout. Being one of the first people to join in purchasing beer shares from the site, I had the pick of any word(s), letters or numbers I wanted. I picked a small handful of numbers and relevant words for my site (1-10, MLM, Marketing, Dogs, so on). I believe that some of the alphabet is still available, otherwise double numbers and letters are easy. I think first picking up a couple of good keywords for your blog would be the best. The pricing breaks down like this.

I spent about $40 on different shares that I listed above. Spending $40 for the 3,000 page views comes out to about $.013 per page view, and every day that drops. Each Beer Share that you purchase is equal to one page. That page can then be left alone and content will be provided for it, or you can have it redirect to a page on your site. I picked about 10 different high quality articles to be linked to. After you purchase your share(s) on Sitehoppin and set up your page by linking it to whatever site you chose, that site and page will start receiving traffic to it. How does that work?

Driving traffic

Driving traffic to your site is really simple. Your page can receive two different types of traffic from Sitehoppin. The first is by people randomly landing on your page when they hit the Site Hoppin button shown in the picture. The second way is to purchase Beer Shares.

What’s the difference between randomly hopping your page and buying Beer Shares?

Beer Share pages on Sitehoppin will receive 30% of the total traffic. This means your page and the others like it that have been purchased will receive about 1/3 of the traffic on Sitehoppin. That might not seem like a lot, but there are 95,000 pages submitted to Sitehoppin (at the time of writing). Currently, 80 Beer Shares have been bought from Sitehoppin. These 80 pages are getting 1/3 of the traffic from the whole site. Every time I log in to the site I see at least 40 registered users logged in and about 2,000 non-registered. With an Alexa rank of 17K, I know Sitehoppin is getting the traffic it boasts. I have had 3,000 page views to our sites from Sitehoppin in the last week. I don’t think there is another place that you can by a few $1 pages (Beer Shares) and get that kind of return. The fact that the traffic keeps coming in and I have invested nothing more also means that it is consistent. It is easy to see that as more people start Sitehoppin, good steady traffic will be generated.

Other benefits

•    You can site hop on your iPod Touch or iPhone.
•    You can submit each article you create, like StumbleUpon without the backlash.
•    Watch the creator of the site with all of his funny video posts.
•    Sell Beer Shares for real money, Buy Low, Sell High.
•    Set Sitehoppin on “slideshow mode,” in order to surf the web in fixed intervals. It is real easy and fun
•    Drop Entrecards while gaining traffic for your own site with “Tag Hoppin.”
•    Gain free traffic from your own “Beer Widget.”

Results

I have gotten far more traffic from Sitehoppin when compared to Entrecard. The bounce rate between the two sites is comparable. The major advantage Sitehoppin has over Entrecard is the amount of time invested. I probably spend 1/4 the time on Sitehoppin for the same number of visitors. The Ability to Tag Hop on Sitehoppin allows you to collect Entrecredits and gain extra traffic by collecting beer credits (very cool, two birds one stone). Hurry, while it lasts, because this site is giving away a lot of traffic to be kept hidden.