By the end of this post you will be able to use this as a step by step guide on how to successfully build high quality backlinks to your website. As we know, backlinks are the lifeblood of most search engines and serve as a vote of endorsement for a website for specific keywords a site will rank for.

As most SEO type people know, all links/votes are not created equally. More work is usually required for getting better backlinks pointing towards your site.

Below is an exchange of email along with an attached guest post from probably the best guest post link builder I have ever seen. Instead of simply posting his guest post, I figured it would better serve my audience by highlighting the best points for those who are looking to use guest posts to build backlinks in the best way imaginable.

This is by no means a rip on Matthew, just simply too good to pass up. Look for my interjections beginning with Josh Here: Blah Blah

Step 1: Find your target

I have no doubt that Matthew took the time to find my site based on a set list of criteria. Is the site active? Does it fit my niche? Does it allow guest posting? What type of blog is it? What can I learn about this person via his about/contact/content and so on?

A little homework goes a long way. It would even help to go as far as making a few comments prior to proposing a guest post (didn’t happen in this case). But from what I have seen, Matthew looks like a well-educated, professional person who specializes in research. Only fitting, given the amount of detail he goes through to ensure the best possible links.

Step 2: Make contact

Below is the first email Matthew sent to me in order to make contact. You’ll notice a few things right off the bat where he uses my name and website in the subject line. This of course tips my interest because us humans love to hear our own name. Then this also serves a duel purpose of keeping track of responses from people after he has hit the send button. Now when I or someone else replies, he knows exactly where, who and what is being talked about.

First Email Sent

Subject: Josh, I Enjoyed Visiting Your Site At JoshWhitford.com – I Have A Question!
From: Matthew Papaconstantinou <weightlosstriumph@gmail.com>
To: josh@joshwhitford.com
Date: Mon, Dec 14, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Dear Josh,

I enjoyed visiting your blog at JoshWhitford.com and enjoyed reading some of your articles. Your tips and techniques provide solid and valuable information to people like me who want to promote their blog.

I am writing to you because I would like to offer you an article that I wrote for your site. The article talks about my niche (weight loss ) and explains how my blog has already started enjoying good rankings as a result of me following your marketing strategies.

The article is informative, unique (never published in another site) and I believe your visitors will enjoy reading.

I would love that the article (see attachment) could find a home at JoshWhitford.com!

Let me know if you accept the article (or need me to modify it) and where it can be located on your site.

Kind Regards
–
Matt Papa
Publisher, WeightLossTriumph.com

Matthew Papaconstantinou, PhD
Washington University Medical School
Department of Biochem. & Molec. Bioph.
660S. Euclid Ave. 63110, St Louis, MO

Josh Here: In the beginning, look at the pumps being primed. A little flattery goes a long way. He quickly and clearly states what he wants and what he is after, plus a little more flattery. He also knows that people will not put up with content that can be found with a simple google.com search and will not post it. As far as I know, all his articles are in fact technically unique with much of the same content idea or same topic, just different wording. He wraps up the email by letting me know that if I don’t like anything, he is willing to correct it along with keeping the dialogue open for the details of where/when things will happen.

Step 3: Take time to produce good, original content

Below is the article that came attached in the first email Matthew sent. I left it completely original so you can see the links he was going for, along with giving him a little do credit for being so damn good at what he does.

By Matt Papa

Internet marketing has become a massive trend for many reasons—not just because of the hard economic times and widespread layoffs, but also because people want to work at home and spend more time with their families, and maybe most of all because individuals with an independent entrepreneurial spirit seek the freedom and innovation they can achieve through this kind of business.

But it seems like many people start at a disadvantage because they are going about it the wrong way—they want to make money without having an idea, a project or a product that they truly, passionately believe in and understand. You don’t have to be the world’s expert or have something that no one else has – that’s actually unlikely or at least quite difficult at this point in the growth of the home-based online business world. But to attract and keep an audience, you have to bring something special to your idea or your project – some added value that you and only you offer.

Perhaps you do have a unique product. If so, that’s a big advantage. Even so, you are still going to need to find effective ways to reach your potential customers and build up their interest in your product. Selling is selling, whether it’s online or door-to-door.

Style without substance and substance without style are both incomplete packages. Neither one will get you far for long.

What you have to sell is yourself and your unique voice and perspective on the value of your product and the needs of your potential market. That’s one reason blogging has become an almost essential part of any online business.

My niche: the weight loss market

Personally, I didn’t have to go out looking for a niche or product to market, because I already had a dedicated interest–the problem of obesity and helping people overcome their weight problems and achieve better health. My research had already given me many ideas and a lot of practical and scientific information, and I really felt a call to share that with other people. Blogging and creating my own website were just natural outgrowths of my desire to inform and share my knowledge.

Because I already had a good background in my topic, I had a head start on many people trying to build businesses online. Not just because I knew things, but because my interest was strong enough and real enough that I was willing to put in a lot of time and energy to build my site, whether I was making money or not. It was a labor of love, which gave me the motivation to stick with it while I learned what worked and how I could make it financially profitable as well as personally satisfying.

A major advantage I had was the magnitude of my niche’s potential market (no pun intended). It is a niche, but a big one. The reality is that two out of three people in the US are overweight, and many of them would like to find a way to help themselves lose weight. So I had no doubt that there was a potential audience and a potential market for the information I wanted to share. I just needed to find the way to put it all together.

My product: The Medifast diet

I had learned about Medifast through my extensive research into successful weight loss programs. It’s a great product that has been around for 25 years and has been tested and recommended by more than 20,000 doctors.

I was aware that Medifast has a great reputation – Forbes business magazine recently named them one of America’s Best 200 Small Companies. When I learned that they also have an affiliate program for marketing their plan, I realized that this could be a great opportunity for me to draw more people to my website, provide them with information and products that would benefit them, and also start earning some return on my investment of time and energy in weightlosstriumph.com.

An affiliate program like Medifast’s works like this. Once you become an affiliate (at no cost to you), you build into your website a link or links that will guide interested readers to the sponsor’s own site—in this case the Medifast site. Each time one of your readers goes on to purchase one of their products, you receive a commission (for Medifast, 20 percent) on that sale. Medifast helps make their links particularly attractive by providing their affiliates with coupons to save your readers money—and make using your link even more inviting.

I could see that this was a perfect opportunity for me, and that I had a perfect website for Medifast. But I also knew that building a true internet marketing strategy would take a little more know-how than just plunking down a link onto my website.

If I could master the internet marketing skills I needed to transform my interest and my blog into a really valuable place that could help people make their weight loss dreams come true, I could also start to make good money online.

Niche + Product + Marketing — Putting it all together

Before people can start clicking on my Medifast links and thereby help my website earn money, first they have to find my website. So how did I go about increasing my visibility and building traffic for my blog? To make the most of my Meidfast affiliation, my website had to find its way to the top of Google’s search list for crucial keywords like “Medifast coupon code” and “Does Medifast work“. But there’s a lot of competition for these keywords.

I knew that just as I wanted to be a go-to site for anyone who is looking for information about Medifast and other important weight-loss facts and opportunities, there are go-to sites experts…like Josh…for people like me who are looking to learn about creating a successful blog and website.

One thing Josh Whitford helped me grasp is the importance of building a community and creating effective backlinks for achieving these search engine rankings. As Josh explains in his helpful 5 easy ways to build backlinks for your blog ,“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.”

Josh also has some really great advice on creating and maintaining a blog that will be a magnet for your niche community. He has three great tips for making your blog successful, but in a way they all boil down to one common factor – commitment. You have to believe in your subject and be committed to it – to making sure that your content is sound and fresh and that you keep it that way by sticking with it. It’s all part of building a community of readers who can trust that will find something new and valuable each time they come to your site.

My site is growing and has a promising future – not only because it’s a great topic that I love, but also because marketing know-how like Josh’s has helped me raise my search engine rankings significantly.

I was lucky that I already had the passion and the enthusiasm for my own subject – best weight loss programs. But being part of Josh’s community has helped me key in on some of the practical things I need to know about and do to keep my blog alive and lively.

Josh Here: Now I don’t really believe that Matthew learned anything from my blog about marketing ideas or how to build backlinks. This guy knows his stuff. But like I mentioned above, a little flattery goes a long way. His article is original, one of a kind and serves as a well-written piece, but tying in weight loss to marketing doesn’t seem to be natural as I have no incoming links about weight loss or anything like that. Almost all my links are related around marketing, unconventional, ideas, josh, techniques and just about every combo of those.

But notice how he took the time to read through a few of my posts and to draw that content into the topic at hand. By doing so he is making his post about weight loss into a marketing post, along with adding link juice to some of my own pages. This makes you think this guy isn’t being selfish, he is just trying to add content to the community and enhance the reader and user experience (probably both, a little bit).

Step 4: The follow through

For the sake of keeping this a little shorter I won’t publish the emails my girlfriend Lindsay has exchanged with Matthew via her Dog Blog. But rest assured that he will go to whatever length possible to make sure that his posts meet your standards and gets published.

He makes sure to keep the dialogue going by following up with relevant emails regarding a new or interesting topic. He will go to length to lay on the flattery thick through the process, like telling my girlfriend how good she looks in her about page picture. Ha, silly Greeks. Be careful with that one, don’t want to accidently piss someone off. I just think it’s funny.

Step 5: When there is gold, dig

Now, I haven’t been this far with Matthew yet and might guess it doesn’t happen. But in any case, I would presume that following up with a blogger after he or she publishes your successful blog post would only be natural. This opens up the opportunity for future guest posts. I would give a good 2-3 months depending on how often the blog posts to follow up again and see how things are going and whether or not the blogger would be interested in another guest post about xyz.

As you can imagine, taking this approach could be a full-time job, and I have no idea when this guy finds time to sleep, but in the end it must be worth the effort via clients or affiliate programs to justify the time spent.

or

Instead of taking the cold calling approach to guest posting and building backlinks, you could develop relationships with people. Building a community would make this whole wine and dine experience much easier. I could simply pull up Skype and ask, hey can I write a post about blah blah blah to get a couple links? … Just another approach to the same end.

In conclusion

If you made it this far you have way too much time on your hands. Or, you are probably in the business of building backlinks for the purpose of ranking a website over another. The formula is as follows:

1. Find appropriate active niche blog
2. Research and produce good content
3. Make contact and use flattery
4. Follow up and correct anything needed
5. Rinse and repeat

As a marketer in Fargo I am pretty new to the game. My story begins in Dec of 2007 when I quit my full-time job to pursue Internet Marketing SEO in Fargo. It started out pretty rough and uneasy as I stumbled my way around the Internet landscape. Thankfully, I was able to find and mentor under a few people who are very good at what they do.

Through them I learned about SEO (search engine optimization) and Internet Marketing that not only paid the bills but put me in a better position to determine the path in which my life went. It is very rare that I go out and look for clients. In fact, I haven’t really at all. Usually people find me through my blog here or one of my other satellite sites. I primarily focus my attention on ranking web pages in the search engines so people will find them. But ranking pages isn’t all I do.

I also help businesses determine what results they want from an online marketing campaign and execute that for them. Their marketing needs and desires can vary greatly from wanting to start a comprehensive marketing campaigns including search engine ranking, social media marketing and other direct marketing approaches. I help them come up with different marketing ideas that fit their needs. For example, they might want a unique approach to solving their problems or to reduce their advertising costs.

Marketing Ideas learned in Fargo

1. It is always better when clients or potential clients find you.

Like I mentioned before, most my clients find me. I spend little time setting up processes for people to find me. Instead of me spending time finding clients, I can spend my time working. As clients and potential clients find you and explain their marketing problems, you are in a much better position to leverage because of the fact that they sought you out.

2. Don’t rely on one marketing approach.

It is easy to think that if something works well once it can always be replicated. The biggest advantage to online marketing is the ability to adapt and change when circumstances warrant it. It is very easy to fall into the trap that one shoe fits all and one client’s success will happen again. Change is good. Change happens all the time. Be prepared to change because it is inevitable.

3. Never put all your marketing eggs in one basket.

Much like the point above. Relying solely on Google for all your traffic and marketing is a scary proposition. What if Google changes and determines your system is flawed? What if Google doesn’t think you have its users’ best interests in mind? Google is a business and will do what is best for Google.

4. Google isn’t the only source of traffic online.

People are becoming connected online greater than ever before. I am seeing a trend that is increasing where people are relying more on each other for answers to questions than just Google. Now, with tools like Twitter and Facebook you can directly ask your questions to the people who can answer them. For example, you might post a question about Las Vegas hotels and what kind of deals they have. Many things take time to populate and be found online. The time people are willing to wait to find an answer is shrinking incredibly.

5. Match expectations with reality; anyone can promise the moon.

Sure, it is easy to say you can solve all of your client’s problems, but usually you cant. It is very important that you are real with your clients and what you can perform for them. Give realistic expectations of time frame and results. Fargo Internet marketing is easier than marketing in New York on a local level but nationally the game changes considerably.

6. Don’t except every job or opportunity that comes your way.

It is extremely easy to want to take every job that passes you by, but don’t. Taking the jobs that are smaller or easier usually turn out to be anything but. It is extremely rare for me to accept a proposal less than 5 figures. In fact, I avoid it. I look for clients who understand the potential power of Internet marketing and want to establish a long-lasting relationship with me. I am not looking to rank your web site for your business name. I am looking to establish a broader relationship that borders partnership.

7. Don’t work for a paycheck, work for people.

Working for a paycheck will only get you a paycheck. The funny thing about paychecks is the fact that they never refer business to you. If you genuinely care about your customers and want to see their problems solved, paychecks will come in abundance. But working for the Almighty $ is going to be a constant struggle.

8. Find an unique approach to solving a client’s problems.

Potential clients are looking for solutions for their problems. When you find those solutions you have earned a client for life. 99% of the time it is a matter of finding what other successful businesses are doing and approach that with an open mind. I am not saying to copy what others are doing because you cannot change the foundation of a business overnight. Rather, look at their approach to solving a problem and analyze the key characteristics they used to solve that problem. In between the lines you will find a solution that will work for your client the same if not better than what worked for them. Could be price, uniqueness, customer service, quality or any number of things.

9. Fire your clients.

Every now and then you need to fire a client. Either fire them or set a new guideline for interaction between you and them. If they don’t like the new terms they fired themselves. It is not worth the headache or dread of dealing with a client. Life is too short for dealing with crummy clients all the time. One client can cause 80% of your problems. If that is the case, dump the client. The same should be expected for you and your business. That’s life.

10. Know your own limitations.

Sometimes I can’t possibly take on a new client. If I did I would only diminish my relationship with my current clients. This isn’t always the case but sometimes I just have to say no. This is usually easy when the proposal is smaller than my baseline but unless I want to hire and train others, I can’t always take new clients. Thankfully we are in a growth and expansion phase that allows us to not only better serve our current customers but frees up space for more customers.

Conclusion

I feel that Internet marketing is the greatest job in the world for me. I love it and wouldn’t have it any other way. I adore my clients and enjoy working with them every day. I am sure the feelings are mutual. It is a pleasure to work with some of the brightest personalities in the business both here in Fargo and across the world. I hope you gained a bit of insight into my world as a Fargo Internet marketing agent and perhaps learned a little too. If you would like to contact me, please visit my contact page or media / consulting page.

One of the topics I caught on talk radio recently was how the FDA announced that most diet pills are bad for us. The kicker was that even pills marked as all natural are bad for the people taking them. I am thinking to myself, “no crap.” Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good for you.

Internet marketing is a lot like diet pills

Internet marketing is not easy. I won’t claim that it is. It is real work. Sometimes at the end of the day having worked 14+ hours, I question why I even bother. But when you accomplish something cool and profitable, it is completely worth it. Like dieting, there is no shortcut.

Let me repeat myself, there is NO shortcut. You can’t take some magic pill that will make you money overnight online. If that were the case, everyone would do it. It takes long hours, a lack of sleep and eating potatoes for months to save on groceries. The reason so many people out there are “pretending” to give you good advice is because they are selling you diet pills. Then when you realize those pills don’t work, they have another one lined up for you to try that “really works this time.” Quit kidding yourself.

95% of the “A-List” bloggers are selling you crap. I fell for it just like most everyone else I know. I was only smart enough to get out of the Internet marketing rat race when I saw a good thing. People like Vic and Grizz taught me how to think like a real Internet marketer and how to profit from it. They will teach you more about Internet marketing than all of the A-listers combined. They can teach you about SEO and how to make money online. If you want proof, just Google “make money online” 3 of the top 10 spots belong to these two guys.

There is a lot of money to be made online. But the pie is shrinking unless you teach yourself some valuable skills. Skills that are not of value include spending 1,000 hours building a list of subscribers who don’t buy what you are selling. That is why it takes the A-listers tens of thousands of subscribers to make money. Do you ever notice that advertisers on their sites don’t buy repeating ads? The reason is because their subscribers don’t buy anything from those advertisers. It’s a big con game. People think if they can get an ad on those bloggers’ sites, some of their money and luck will rub off on them. Nine times out of 10, the advertisers lose and the blogger wins, and you’re the sucker if you bought anything. Trust me I know.

Quit buying diet pills

It’s time to start exercising. If you want to make money online you need to learn a set of skills that will help you to do that. Pick your poison as far as what you want to do. I chose SEO because there is not a lot of competition here in Fargo and it is a lot of fun ranking websites for new keywords. I hope what you choose is something that you really love because when times get tough and you aren’t making any money, you better love it in order to stick through it. Internet marketing is a race. You don’t win races by taking pills. You have to train, sweat, eat right and have commitment.

The #1 thing any of you can do is stop kidding yourself and decide to start working hard towards your goal. It’s either that or go about doing what you’re doing and continue to watch results slip away. I made a choice to quit my job and make a living online doing something I was passionate about. I am extremely thankful I found people willing to share what they know with me freely allowing me to accomplish my dream. I would like to make the same commitment to you as well. I will gladly and willfully tell you all I know, what I’ve learned and continue to learn. All you have to do is ask.

I have to warn you that I am only a willing vessel. You can take what you want and leave the rest. I just promise not to sell you Internet marketing diet pills. I am sure I will have more to come on this subject. I dare ask if you have any Internet marketing horror stories, but if you do and would like to share them feel free to do so. Just remember, you can lose weight for free just like you can make money online for free, it just takes hard work and time. I am always available for discussion via my contact page.