Build My Rank really has been a business changer for me. Well not by itself obviously – in fact if you don’t have a plan to start of with then – you don’t need this post you need the Keyword Academy instead!
Back about a month ago I signed up to BuildMyRank: review and rankings were on my mind, then I was pretty excited about it. Well now I am ecstatic about it! Why? I’m seeing rankings jump and jump significantly and with them income. Will the rankings hold? Who knows – but meanwhile I’ll take the money thanks.
Have I a got detailed results to prove this? Nope – these were sites that I was previously supporting using Postrunner – so maybe I could have waited a month and seen the results jumping on the Postrunner submissions- I don’t know – frankly it takes a lot of time to document that type of detail and I don’t have duplicate sites: same niche, same age similar content etc to do proper split testing. Instead I swapped my writer over from writing for Postrunner to BMR and sat back to see what happened.
What I do know is that BMR plus my writer is hands-off outsourcing for me – and Postunner plus writer wasn’t. That’s worth not just about an hour a day of my time, its more than that because it means that suddenly there are about 17 sites I don’t have to think about more than once a month – I can focus on other stuff. Important stuff like this:
Oh OK and growing my business as well …
A few days ago several people posted about a minor PR update and a Google dance in their rankings. I knew that nothing dramatic had happened to mine as my Adsense was tracking nicely to an all time record – but on the 1st I ran all my sites for rankings again in Market Samurai – I was up, almost across the board, sometimes dramatically so, sometimes just a little. Now these are all sites which have fairly similar characteristics:
- they are mainly niche sites – less than 30 pages indexed generally;
- the youngest are 7 months old, most are over a year;
- most are WordPress, some aren’t (I see no difference between html sites and blogs in the rankings);
But I also took an old site – hadn’t been updated for nearly 2 years. I wrote a new page focused on a new keyword – used Impact Page Builder to optimize the on-page SEO – posted 10 back links to the new page from BMR over a week – its now ranking in the 20s for a moderately competitive term.Pretty darn impressed with that.
Do I Need Backlinks At All?
Some will say not – some successful webmasters say they never build backlinks. They argue that you might as well spend your time building your own site rather than adding it to other people’s site. Most of those webmasters don’t make any money – so I tend to discount them – after all this ain’t a hobby! Some of them do a lot of real-world promotion – or have even got at book to their name. I discount them – that is not a business model for me.
But some of them make money , good money, better than I do. What do they have that I don’t? Without exception they have websites which are 10 or more years old – that age thing you can’t fake! And the site has been up that whole time, even if it started off long before WordPress and is now a blog – it doesn’t matter – Google doesn’t care about your technology – but it REALLY cares that the site has been about the same general topic for 10 years.
Which tends to mean that the sites involved – are passion sites – the person started them in 1999 because they LOVED the topic – not because they could make money from it. The clever ones make money now. And they have backlinks, lots of backlinks, natural, organic backlinks because they are market leaders in their niche and other people link to them – and yes every one of the sites I know about in this category are SOCIAL sites too.
If you have one of those sites – you don’t need me and congratulations. Do I really, really, really wish I’d started my passion site about independent travel in 1999 – oh yes I do! But I didn’t and you – gentle reader – probably didn’t either. So for the rest of us – well we need to game the system basically … you need to manipulate your backlinks. You need to build them, you need to pay someone else to do it for you.
Lis’s Views on Backlink Profiles
- If the site is new – its more important to get authority links than it is to get bulk links. You need to get some “real” links from sites which are recognized as authority in the niche (not just PR). Some Postrunner sites will work for this – as will blogs which accept guest posts in your niche – if its a social niche that is.
- Different niches work differently for backlinks – travel bloggers, and frugal living bloggers comment on each other’s sites ALL the time. Niches about embarrassing personal problems and serious debt – not so much. I suspect that Google has a “normal backlink profile” for some niches – deviate too far from it – and you will be sand boxed for a while. You will come back after a while (or any competitor could take out any site at anytime).
- I have ranked and kept a site in position #1 with only crappy backlinks and no new content – for 2 years – its hard to stuff this up but some approaches will see results faster than others. I’ve NEVER seen a site deindexed because of bad backlinks – certainly have seen sites sent to position 500 purgatory though!
- If your sites are in a niche which is “social” then its probably worth having some twitter and Facebook love going on around it – after all it looks normal …
- Getting the SEO right and siloing your site so that it doesn’t have unrelated links on the page – really does seem to be significant
Lis’s Views on Backlink Services
- All backlinking services are gaming the system: Postrunner and EzineArticles included.
- Gaming the system works – to a greater or lesser extent.
- Backlink services work better with a more established site – that old thing of site age is still something you can’t fake – if you want a genuine short-cut in this game – buy an aged site in the niche you want.
- Backlinks to backlinks also works – I think this is the major weakness of Postrunner – but you can help yourself with this with things like backlinking services to keep your links indexed.
- Until you are making about $500/month from your sites I don’t really think you can justify paying for additional backlink services – and if your sites are less than one year old you are also probably risking your money as well.
- There is a risk involved with using any service – sometimes they do die a slow death – which may be terminal if the owners don’t do something about it (basically Google discounts the sites being used over time) – don’t ever signup for a service for longer than a month. On the flip side you really need to commit to 2 or 3 months to really evaluate a service so that is the amount of money you are risking.
- Doing ANY backlinking is never a waste – at the moment BuildMyRank seems to work exceptionally well – that may drop back to just averagely well – the point is if I am using it to build at least 10 links a day to my sites I will outrank you if you are still worrying about whether you should backlink at all.
Sorry I went on a bit – the bottom line is – this game isn’t that hard -and it doesn’t change that much over the years – and the best info you will ever get is building your own sites and EXPERIMENTING – then you will really find out what does and does not work.
I’ve just enrolled in a new backlink scheme too – but I probably won’t have any results before the end of the year on this one – so I’m not prepared to name it here – but it does have absolutely EVIL affiliate program so contact me if you want the link LOL – we can do a deal!
So are you building baclinks? Using what if any services? Using your own backlink sites only? Or do you only publish on your own site?